It's been a while since I posted any kind of progress report on my work.. so I thought I'd try and get back in the habit of talking about what I'm doing - and what some of my colleagues are doing too.

As most of you know, my main work is on WebVelocity - we're working against an aggressive schedule right now trying to stabilize the software to get to a 1.0 release. We're getting there, the whole user interface has drastically changed since I last made some screencasts - so I'm overdue to create some new ones. That's true of my OpenGL work too.

We have a migrations system in WebVelocity now - you can provide two Glorp Schemas and it will compute the changes required to change from schema 1 in to schema 2. You can then save these steps as a script and change them as you see fit to create a reproducible transformation for your production databases.

We have also amalgamated the guides with the reference APIs in our documentation system. This has brought to life a whole host of content written by our documentation guys Bruce Boyer and Mark Roberts. There are a few kinks to iron out but it's a huge step forward to get so much content available at our fingertips.

Previously the user interface used a lot of right click context menus.. everywhere. As cool as this was, people just weren't expecting it and would even expect the right click menus to act like mac 9 menus in places too.. so we dropped that idea and made the user interface more web-interface like. The end result, I believe, is simpler to use and to learn, so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out too.

We also have several smart menus now too - the Classes menu organizes your classes by the model, by the type and by recently visited. Similarly, the Browse menu provides the link to browse the page as well as a link to go to the class that defines it. These are big productivity savers and I really like them.

We also have a theme system for the scaffolding with several themes by Jerry Kott that are seaside related. As well as that, Jerry implemented a template system - these is not your Ruby On Rails templates. These are kick-start templates - basically, they are demo applications that can run in their own right - or you can clone them as your own application and change them to suit your own desires. This can be a great way to get going.

There'll be one more build this year before we go on our holiday break - then we'll be back at the helm on the 5th. If you're interested in trying out the builds, drop me an email and we'll see about getting you in to the beta program for WebVelocity.