Busy Monday morning. We started out with Josh joining us and giving us a small report. He is working on some custom reports and making a few changes to the discount engine and the inventory engine projects. We setup a time to do some code review and sign-off for this coming Wednesday.

Alan gave us an update on automation of USAePay (merchant processing) and reoccurring billing stuff. He has a client wanting similar reoccurring billing options built out for another gateway called Converge and Converge Connect. Alan also gave us an update on the invoice due date project, using internal universe API sockets, refactoring sub inventory, taking corp-wide settings out to a server scope memory cache vs direct database pull every time. That should be a good time saver and be more efficient. He was also talking about some new getters and setters (ways of pushing and pulling the data in smaller direct pieces). Cool stuff and he seems to be making progress.

Dustin and Steve were talking about AJAX (asynchronous connections) and how some of the new changes have really sped things up with one-pager interfaces and loading graphics, and faster more direct database look-ups. Dustin was volunteering to add some of these asynchronous calls to other pages and reports. By way of definition, a normal synchronous (or in-line) call means that you go ask for some data and you wait until you get everything back. Think of one giant clump of data being returned. You then report back to the browser or user and show the page. An asynchronous call (or on-demand as needed) allows you to return basic information and structure very quickly (the user will see something on the page). It then uses asynchronous calls and connections and fills in data as it can and/or as it gets returned. This is great for data that may be a subset of the main data and/or you want a user to click or interact to see additional results. It is a way of breaking up the data and speeding up the loading and display time. Great stuff and Dustin is doing great on some of his sub projects.

After that, it was just Steve and I on the meeting. We talked about a number of different topics. We have been doing more testing out in the AWS (amazon web services) land and getting things ironed out there in AWS land. Wayne is doing great and making awesome progress. Steve and I setup some time for tomorrow to work on balance sheet related project. We are going to be diving in deep and looking at how certain values are being tracked. That small conversation brought up some other topics such as caching, efficiency, moving more towards aggerated (summed up data) type transactions, etc. We are seeing more needs for watchers, feeders, triggers, etc. We even talked briefly about the underlying goal of getting all of the data organized into a 3D calendar of sorts. Fun to bounce back to past ideas and concepts. Good stuff.

Eric called in and was out on the road. He had a couple of questions and gave us some updates on some custom 3rd party solutions and custom reports that he is working on. As an interesting side note, some of the comments between Eric and Steve had an interesting undertone. Nothing negative, but definitely complex and cross-corp oriented. They, both Steve and Eric, are working on custom consolidation reports, cross-corp reports, and even multi-corp syncing. The deeper we get, certain clients are wanting to standardize data across platforms, across systems, and even across servers. It is getting more complex and we are seeing needs where we may have a master corporation and then being able to cascade certain data from a master corporation setup to an unlimited number of sub or slave type corporations. We are seeing both data and reporting needs that need to be synced between multiple corporations. This syncing type need is in an effort to help with collaboration and standardizing data across systems. Almost getting into a data warehousing type need or data warehousing type environment. Kinda interesting.

After Eric, Bryan joined us and had a few questions for both Steve and I. He is working on custom gram tracking (subs of the shopping cart) and taking certain gram tracking settings and helping them cascade all the way over to custom label building. It is interesting to see the levels of customization and the needs that some of these clients are expressing. The scary side to that is... how far are we willing to go and what will that take? Custom is potentially a huge swinging door. Awesome, powerful, but potentially bigger than we would like.

In between these different little meetings. I finished up the documentation to go with the getWebGeneralInventory API socket method call. I was working on that project last week a little bit. I added a small working document (to do list and brainstorming doc) for the small changes and to help with the project scope. Nothing major, just wanted to record it. Busy morning. It must be Monday.