Nemein has today acquired a new General Manager into the company. We are delighted to benefit from the experience and keen insights of the brand new Nabaztag. Here you can see it already settled in our office:

The idea with the WiFi bunny is to connect it as an ambient information display for our OpenPsa management suite. Some use cases we have so far envisioned include:

• Displaying status of the support ticket queue via the belly lights
• Alerting us of new tickets
• Reporting the number of invoiceable hours reported at the end of the day
• Alerting of calendar events happening at the office
• Generally handling status messages based on our Plazes locations

Technologically this should be quite simple using OpenPsa's integrated notification framework and the PEAR Services_Nabaztag library.

I will report when we have some concrete results with this.

Technorati Tags: nabaztag, erp, openpsa

I'm currently building a lightning fast CRM on top of CouchDB. And because of that I needed to create a jQuery library for the CouchDB as I use jQuery to handle other parts of the system.

More details and screenshots coming soon.

The library can be downloaded here

*UPDATED* the library is now located at http://jquery.com/plugins/project/jqcouch [2007-09-23] 

Hopefully someone else finds this useful too.
And if you have any feedback or feature request feel free to write me email.

CouchDB is a very interesting evolution in open source data storage: an ad-hoc document database with replication support. I heard the first time about CouchDB when Jan Lehnardt was presenting it in FrOSCon a month ago, and became immediately very interested.

The database is available for various different platforms, and provides a RESTful JSON API, which makes it very easy to access basically from any programming languages. To make things even simpler, access libraries have emerged for various languages like PHP and Ruby.

This weekend Jerry Jalava released a jQuery CouchDB access library. This is an important step for us as Midgard is already making the jQuery migration, and we are considering to use CouchDB for a project.

So, why CouchDb? First of all, it is something new and interesting. And it is multiplatform and replicated, meaning that we should be able to get our data everywhere, from a web server to Mac desktop to an Internet Tablet. Besides regular database usage, some of the PHP code deployment ideas are also promising.

Technorati Tags: couchdb, jquery

While there is no public release yet, I though to give a heads-up on a project we're working on with Jerry: Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we're taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

• Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
• Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
• Simple base data types (note, event, contact, ...) that users can customize and extend
• Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb's restful JSON interface)
• Speed

To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.

Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb, openpsa

Yesterday was a big day for Ajatus - The Distributed CMS as it got its site up and running.
Read more from Bergie's blog.

I'll soon start writing some highlights that the system keeps inside...

Notes about Ajatus

New release of the object database used by Ajatus

Version 0.7.0 of CouchDb was released yesterday. CouchDb is a very interesting object database that powers our Ajatus CRM.

Main changes in 0.7.0 were:

• JSON instead of XML
• Javascript view engine
• Easier build system
• ...and a nice administrative UI

With the new release Ajatus is a lot easier to set up as CouchDb can be installed straight from release packages.

Technorati Tags: couchdb

Just finished the first step in the "Add field" -support in Ajatus today.
Next step is to add editing and deleting to the added fields.
I have also planned a template support to the fields so one can save the added fields as template and reuse that.

I'm happy to announce the release of totally rewritten jqCouch -library. Major changes were made so this version is no longer compatible with the older release. Talking with CouchDB is now done through 3 type of connections.

db -connection:
This is used to handle all those Database related tasks such as creating and deleting.
Available methods:

• exists
• info
• create
• del
• all
• restart

doc -connection:
This is used to handle all those Document related tasks. Creating, Updating, Deleting documents.
Available methods:

• get
• all
• save
• bulk_save
• del
• (post)
• (put)

view -connection:
This handles all actions related to Views.
Available methods:

• exists
• info
• get
• save
• del
• temp
• (put)

All result methods (methods that return something from the database) return their results through wrapper which can be extended with own custom method. This can be used to render the results to something else or execute other actions as soon as the query is ready. One can register this mapping method globally, for connection or for each method separately.

Some basic usage examples:

creating connections:

//Database connection
var dbc = $.jqCouch.connection('db');
//Document connection with custom config
var dc = $.jqCouch.connection('doc', {cache:true});
//View connection with connection specific mapping function
var vc = $.jqCouch.connection('view', function(data){return data;});
//Database connection with connection specific mapping function and custom settings
var dbc = $.jqCouch.connection('db', function(data){return data;}, {cache:true});

Setting global configurations:

$.jqCouch.set_defaults({
    cache: true
});

Creating new document (One liner):

var revision = $.jqCouch.connection('doc').save('doc_db', {id: "0", title: 'test'})._rev;

More info can be found from the source of the library and the testsuite included in the release This library is part of the Ajatus - Distributed CRM

For some reason the jQuery website is not working properly and it seem that it has reverted to some old backup as the release no longer exists there. Here is a local link to the release: jqcouch-2.0.1.zip

Ajatus, our new distributed CRM app is evolving very quickly. For example, this week we got form validation and auto-saving support, and there has been talk of supporting binary file attachments.

As we're nearing first release, the plan is to start dogfooding Ajatus quite soon. For me personally this has been cause of some concern, as Ajatus is quite browser-intensive and my Firefox 3 beta has proven to be crashy. So, a Web Worker Daily story on site-specific browsers came at a very good time: in a couple of minutes I had Fluid installed and was having a separate Ajatus window launchable straight from the OS X Dock.

Fast, nice, and separate from whatever I may be doing in my actual browsing sessions. I like it.

Setting up Ajatus in Fluid

Ajatus as a Mac desktop app!

Note: Mozilla Lab's Prism does the same with a more cross-platform, but I like Fluid for the WebKit speed and simplicity.

Technorati Tags: ajatus, crm, fluid, osx, prism

Just added metadata and revision navigation to object view.

By wick3d 2 weeks, 2 days ago.

Hey, I just changed Ajatus preferences to use pt_BR (or any other language) but for some reason interface still in English? Any idea?

By everaldo 2 weeks, 1 day ago.

Ok, I know that is a stupid question but this git works really different from cvs and svn. How I can update an existing repo?

By everaldo 2 weeks ago.

Something like: svn update

By everaldo 2 weeks ago.

Yesterday I finished adding the metadata and revision navigation to object view in Ajatus . Now one is able to browse through the available revisions of a object and edit any of these.

Thanks. Translation is working now. Brazilian Portuguese coming.

By everaldo 2 weeks ago.

Ajaxian: Ajatus: Distributed CMS using CouchDB

Fetched from del.icio.us/bergie/ajatus 1 week ago.

Way.Nu: CouchDB + Ajatus

Fetched from del.icio.us/bergie/ajatus 1 week ago.

pretty good, 1200 visitors on ajatus.info yesterday

By bergie 6 days, 20 hours ago.

Just added Basic form validation support and Auto saving

Fetched from News 6 days, 15 hours ago.

duesentrieb.org: It is a lot of fun to see people get excited - CouchDB and Ajatus

Fetched from del.icio.us/bergie/ajatus 6 days, 10 hours ago.

Added infinite scrolling support. Before pushing it to the repo I must make legacy support for the old tags DB as it doesn't exist anymore

By wick3d 6 days, 8 hours ago.

Also tags view and a helper method to create bunch of documents for testing are now done.

By wick3d 6 days, 8 hours ago.

Webkit and FF3 renders 12.400 document listing soooooo smoothly :) FF2 has some minor hikups but manages to do it pretty well

By wick3d 6 days, 8 hours ago.

Lots of stuff committed. ie. Access key support (Ctrl+n = new object). If you have old install I suggest backup before pulling the latest

By wick3d 4 days, 14 hours ago.

To get bunch of data to your database try the new doc generator. $.ajatus.utils.doc_generator. Examle in ajatus.core:627-628

By wick3d 4 days, 14 hours ago.

More info from the official site Ajatus.info
Hopefully full stable release will come inside January or February.

...and Ajatus 0.5.0 is available for the world!

By bergie 3 days, 16 hours ago.

Barely made it in December, but first beta of Ajatus, the distributed CRM is now available. Enjoy!

Read the installation instructions to get started. Once CouchDb 0.7+ has proper installers available things will be much easier.

Now for champagne... Happy new year from the Nemein team!