Spring/FTL Conversion Spike

JIRA: MIFOS-4409

Goals of spike

• get hot FTL pages working again (fast turnaround on ftp page revisions)
  • eclipse: need to add resources dir containing FTL to build path and set preferFileSystemAccess to true. run mvn war:war in application
• convert client savings account creation area to Spring/FTL
  • service facades in place so all data/behaviour should be available, if not we will need to tweak and happy to help/collaborate on this with stanley/whoever.
  • (Reached from Clients&Accounts tab, Create Savings account link on left side)
  • Create Pages:
    • Create Savings Account - Select a customer;
    • Create Savings account - Enter Savings account information (2 pages) ;
    • Create Savings account - Preview Savings account information
    • Edit Savings account information button from preview page
  • testing
    • unit tests (in memory) for Spring controllers (for significant functionality)
    • UI level acceptance tests - functional UI test in place - CreateSavingsAccountTest
    • schedule manual walk through of CSS with PM/QA/Dev.
    • manual UI test by QA on multiple browsers
  • use and document FTL templates
  • use and document code patterns
  • identify addition templates/patterns that are needed to accelerate work
• identify whatever ways we can to accelerate Spring/FTL conversion
• re-estimate total effort for conversion accross mifos based on single conversion from spike
• faster testing?
  • Create API for createSavingsAccount - different spike assigned to Kojo:
  • functional UI test in place - CreateSavingsAccountTest - any rework involved with that test due to spike?

Stories

• document eclipse FTL configuration for hot FTL pages
• Proposal - One timeboxed story on FTL spike

More ideas for dev tasks

• technical improvements
  • enable instant reloading of Freemarker templates
    • (Stanley was saying he was able to hook it up to WTP and hot
      deployments?)
    • Michael Vorburger is also working on dev setup improvements, which
      includes the promise of instant FTL reloads
    • have early UI walkthrough on dev box with PM and QA
  • use JRebel
  • spend time summarizing and adding transparency to off-list work by
    Stanley Kwok & Michael Vorburger
  • could we use Spring Roo on top of Services/ServiceFacades?
  • better templates
    • reusable css pieces (use Compass?)
    • reusable ftl widgets
• measuring/managing the effort
  • as a control to measure against: estimate of how fast it's been going
    in the past e.g. Product Mix page took x days and had 23 bugs logged on
    new implementation
  • measures: what is the time required to build new FTL; how many bugs
    found by QA during manual testing; number of automated tests and time
    to write new automated tests
  • may need to measure twice - once on first try where we have trial
    and error, then second time with better defined
  • show how are new ideas are speeding up the process
• team for sprint
  • multiple devs
  • fast feedback: tight integration w/testers
    • some testing happening every day
• QA effort includes
  • new acceptance test for page (or fix/improve old test)
  • manual test pass to see if any bugs can be found in new FTL
  • seperate but associated spike on building API test for create Savings
    account
• logistical/infrastructure improvements
  • make sure all devs have fast hardware / fast internet

Spring Web flow examples in application

• user.xml (not yet brought into application)
• createQuestion.xml