This is another case where 'sometimes' the best solution is the one you create yourself. In this scenario, I was faced with the crippling process of gathering and analyzing metrics for our SW-CMM initiatives. After doing this by hand a few times I realized that I had to find a way to automate the process and define more objective measuring criteria for the team. Here is where the geek part comes in... All of the data was stuck in a proprietary portal engine that had no 'advertised' interfaces... 'They' said I was only allowed to view content via the browser. You know 'They', because we all work for 'Them'. There are those of us who understand what we do not manage, which is often managed by those that do not understand what 'They' manage... Got it?... Good!... Ok, I will play... In this application I embedded a number of browsers and created bots that would crawl through the portal, scrape the data out, normalize it, model it, cache it, and then apply it to a charting engine I developed for the font-end. This process was eventually relagated to a server-based product with a service layer allowing access to scraped data by clients. One thing led to another, and I found myself integrating with Microsoft Outlook, implementing full-screen briefing support, chart image capturing and extraction, and the aforementioned implemention of a service oriented layer to support multiple client access. Ok... A little out of control?... Maybe... but it made my job; in this area; super easy and I had a lot fun working with the embedded browsers, DOMs, bot methods, service layers, owner-drawn charting, etc. Hey, it’s a geek thing... :-)
As a side note... Sadly... Sometimes I find that I am one of 'Them', ohhh the horror! Nevermind, it comes with a pay raise... :-)
Tags: side projects