Well, this won’t quite work out, since I already have the contract in hand.

However, I’ll write up what I am going to do, what I am doing, and the milestones reached. Well, a software development blog.

So, what’s the project about?

I have to build a web-based Document management system.

Requested Features:

• Single Sign On
• Import documents from a network share
• Storage of metadata (an odd one in this case is, that physical locations have to be recorded, too, in case the government agency sending it cannot deal with electronic documents. Legal requirements are fun like that)
• Fortunately, no detailed tracking for SOX or other such regulations.

What’s coming up

At first, I’ll post progress about gathering requirements, proposals and recommendations of solutions for these requirements that go out to the client (after I’ve sent them, though).

After that, I’ll report my progress with the application: What I did, why I did it, and what the challenges were.

And last but not least, I’ll talk about the deployment of the application, and its maintenance.

So, what are you using?

The web application framework is going to be Ruby on Rails, the database back-end MySQL, the webserver will be Apache of some sort. What’ll serve the Rails pages I don’t know yet. Maybe Glassfish with JRuby, maybe mod_rails, possibly the classic Apache + Pack of Mongrels solution. We’ll see when I get there.

My development OS will be Windows XP together with a Debian VM and a Kubuntu 8.04 installation as primary development OS.

The deployment will be on FreeBSD 5.4 (I know, I can’t influence that, and neither can my client).

The approach I’ll be using, even though I’m just one person, is a simple variant of Agile Development: Sprints, and loads of tests before I write the actual code.