In an effort to get off track

Well, I’ve been attempting the last week or two to get off track again from my goal of working on a wireframe tool. I’ve looked at numerous open source projects, all J2EE related, but none specifically for wireframes. I now find myself installing <a href=http://www.xplanner.org>XPlanner</a> which I wanted to a long time ago after seeing it mentioned in some Agile methodology book I was reading on O’Reilly’s <a href=http://safari.oreilly.com/ >Safari</a>. Anyway XPlanner looks pretty cool, but I’ll probably try to adapt it to Scrum and make use of it as I build the wireframe. More on it as I take a look at it. I have to nod off to bed soon.

On a completely unrelated note, I must investigate the Lego craze behind <a href=http://www.lego.com/eng/bionicle/default.asp>Bionicle’s</a> I just got a bunch of them for one of my daughters friend’s birthday party and the intiguing thing is I can’t figure out how they are much more interesting then regular legos. Is there a game angle or something I just don’t know about. Must quiz the 6 year old tomorrow on this fascination.

Time to build a tool.

After using a decent wireframe tool on a project, one that’s ColdFusion based, Rebar, I’ve decided I have an itch to scratch. I think I could build a better wireframe. Rebar works alright for its purposes, but it’s kind of limited, it doesn’t really lend itself to a bit more representation which is good and bad. On a lot of wireframes you want to focus on the navigation and the content which a spare wireframe serves pretty well. But when the tool won’t even let you represent common layout formats or simple html forms it feels a little limited. I do like the file based system, since it takes out the hassle of having a particular database to worry about. I’ll probably do it with Struts and simple java io, or possibly the new NIO package.

Oh definitions first–wireframes are simple HTML mockups of a site. They don’t have the real look and feel of the final web site, and the focus is just to flesh out the web site in advance of any actual coding