Stravati is a time-management and collaboration tool. It can be thought as a persistent storage for tasks, projects, ideas and contacts that you can use to keep your mind clean. But it is much more than that. It allows to organize your thoughts, plans and time and quickly get items relevant for the moment. The system provides much flexibility in tasks management. So it can be used as a simple todo list management application as well as a full blown GTD tool with hierarchic projects and delegation.
Besides of that, Stravati provides collaboration ability. You can use it not only by yourself, but for your team, family, organization or all of them. The system allows to establish team projects, manage participation and track progress. It also provides discussion capabilities. The most wonderful thing in this is that each user may follow his/her own time management process while cooperating with team-mates. In order to make communication more effective Stravati manages information about user's contacts also.
For user comfort we have built several interfaces, which of them have it's own pros and cons.
Web Application
The web interface was built for greater availability and easy of use. There is no need to install something to use it. So you can access your GTD storage from cafe, home workplace or any point with Internet access in one click. It is built with the ground-breaking Google Web Toolkit technology and provides a rocket-fast user interface. As the application runs inside the user's browser we were able to build very interactive system with sub-second update and tasks selection time. Besides that we were able to put intellectual behavior to the system and provide hints basing on user input and data semantics. So in most cases user doesn't need to enter precise dates, link work items and do other routine staff. English grammar based analyzer extracts work item's attributes from descriptions in natural language sentences (English only at the moment).
The system tracks activities important for user (team-mate actions, data modifications & etc) and shows them on a time line inside the application. These data as well as work items are available through Atom/iCalendar feeds.
Web 2.0 application consists from two parts: server application and in-browser application. Server part executes all data access and processing code, and the big part of presentation. So the server is enforced to store and manage state of user interface. Actually, in Web 1.0 systems there were only one part: server web application. This is not true in our case. GWT based systems execute real applications inside a browser. So interface's state doesn't need to be stored on the server. So server part becomes stateless and very scalable. And the browser part becomes quicker, as only minimal of data need to be exchanged.
So the whole application architecture looks as follows:
The Smart cache improves application performance even more eliminating network latency and reducing server load. In advance to caching we were able to significantly improve perceived performance by optimization of work items rendering by introduction of item templates, reuse of HTML code and semi-parallel rendering. You can read details there GWT: Improving performance Part 1, Part 2.
Application has a smart cache on the browser side. So in most cases it does not need to access server to show information about work items and contacts.
Supported browsers:IE 6/7, Firefox 2/3, Safari 2/3Technologies:JEE, Google Web Toolkit, JavaScript, Spring, Hibernate, Compass/Apache Lucene, JBoss (Caching, JMS, Management), MySQL
Microsoft Outlook plugin
The MS Outlook plugin synchronizes Stravati space with Outlook Tasks view. It uses a trusted XML based synchronization interface which provides access to all task data. A revision based algorithm is used for synchronization. So only changed items are sent in both direction. The plugin is able to detect update conflicts which are resolved by user's intervention.
The add-on is compatible with multiple Outlook versions and stores data in non-intrusive format. So task folder can be stored on Microsoft Exchange server and synchronized with compatible mobile devices.
Supports:Microsoft Outlook 2000/XP/2003/2007, Outlook synchronizing PDAsTechnologies:Microsoft Visual C++ 2003, Component Object Model, Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, curl
Mail Interface
The mail interface allows to create new work items by sending e-mail onto secret personal mailboxes. The received emails are processed by natural language analyzer and put into the personal space. So user is able to create new entries through email clients, and e-mail gateways like
http://www.jott.com.
Technologies:Apache JAMES, mailets, JavaScript
Third-party API
The system provides and open Application Programming Interface in order to allow customers to build site extensions specific for their needs. The API is exposed through REST and XML-RPC protocols together with API key and token based authentication. So users don't need to share Stravati access credentials with third-parties and can control data access in by each installed extension.Together with public API there is a extended interface for trusted partners.
Technologies:JSP/Servlets, JiBX, XDoclet
The project is in Private Alpha phase.
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