We all jumped on the server meeting. Wayne was showing me his new monitoring services (watching for form submissions and URL values for internal pages per user per server). We went over some of the custom stuff, encryption, and ended up doing a huge asynchronous database update using AJAX and JavaScript. The update did a series of loops and reported back as things were happening. We are switching our database table engine from MyISAM tables to Innodb tables inside of the MySQL database. That was kinda a big internal switch.

Wayne spent some time and showed me around and went through the code with me. I know that we can use some of those same asynchronous techniques to speed up some of our long running reports or processes. Pretty cool.

Wayne was pretty creative how he blended session values, ColdFusion, method calls, AJAX, JavaScript, database updates, and reporting all into one small page flow. It was cool to see the pieces and then watch them work in real time. I enjoyed it.

After that, Steve has some questions with his VPN connection (VPN = virtual private network). Wayne helped him uninstall and reinstall the VPN software. They got it working again. Steve uses his VPN to push up code via FTP to all of the servers. We use that all of the time. If we don't FTP the files, we have to redeploy and pull master code branches on the different servers. Sometimes, the FTP route is much faster, and we can target single servers if we have to do some live testing that relies on certain data or certain sets of settings (data and configuration stuff).

Wayne left and Steve and John started going over timeclocks and internal timecards. Steve gave John a number of new permissions to be able to look around inside of adilas to check and look at numbers. John then gave Steve and I a small walk-through demo on the discount engine. Steve and John spent a bit of time talking about graphs, charts, and adding in eye candy to the system. Currently, it doesn't have much eye cand or sweet visuals to help show the data that we are holding. If truth be known, we are holding tons and tons of super awesome data, it is just hidden and only shown in a tabular format right now. Also, the users have to ask for the data right now, there is nothing that is pushing the important things up to the surface (push technology or using dashboard type utilities). It could really do some cool things if we got the right charts, graphs, sums, counts, and other business intelligence (BI) stats and values. That's where we are heading.

Steve and John were talking about the future fracture project and how each page will end up getting its own page level settings. Things like: What to show? What to hide? What tabs or sub sections will be displayed and what interfaces will be the default per person? More talk about settings, dashboards, and making the data sing and talk vs just holding it all. We really want to get it out into the business intelligence (BI) level. That will be so cool!