Non-Profit Tech Blog

UPDATE (11/27/2006): If you want to follow along with Shaun Sullivan during the podcast, please download the Powerpoint presentation. Don’t mind the “this presentation is confidential” note. Blackbaud tells me it’s now publicly available.

These are my notes from the first thirty minutes of Shaun Sullivan’s recent talk on emerging technologies in Blackbaud applications. My comments will be in italics. I figured most of you folks didn’t want to slog through the entire one hour podcast so I did the slogging for you. I discovered that there are some oddities in the .mp3 file. I urge you to go download the mp3 yourself and tell me if these seemingly garbled cuts occur for you. Basically, the following times in the first thirty minutes of the mp3 seem to be a little sketchy as if someone were editing certain pieces out (sloppily I might add). :

2:36 – 2:50
12:48
13:20 – 13:40

Perhaps Blackbaud didn’t want to talk about who it’s working with in a public forum…

There are some interesting highlights that I didn’t know about previously. Blackbaud products may be REST and JSON aware. That’s good news for web developers who don’t want to learn the arcane arts of SOAP and WSDL definitions. Here are some good links if you don’t know much about these Web programming technologies:

JSON
REST
SOAP

I like Shaun Sullivan’s presentation style. He tries not to lose his audience even though it’s obvious many of them can’t really go where he wants to take them. He needs to give this kind of talk at the NTC. Katrin, are you listening?

Without further ado, here’s the first thirty minutes of his talk:

Web Services

Some of it in research, some in development and some in core products. We’re giving you a high-level roadmap including timeframes. First emerging technology…

The most important is… web services…starting to surface in Blackbaud products in a pervasive fashion. Web services now showing up in RE underneath Web Services option.

Pretty much all the way you communicate, the way Blackbaud integrates with another option, the way you customize a Blackbaud application will be going through web services conduit moving 2007, 8 and beyond. We will be platform agnostic.

2:36 – 2:50 seems to be a couple of things cut out.

Canonical example is NetCommunity which is location transparent but still talking realtime to Raiser’s Edge because all the calls are via a web service.

With the 7.7 version of RE format, it returns in XML format the record that was added. The API now supports .NET. IN RE7, look in your RE7 folder. There’s a directory called PIA which is the repurposed API so it can be accessed via .NET. With version 7.81 of RE, Blackbaud supports .NET Framework 2.0. One can use VB or C# express for free from Microsoft which is a “totally rich development tool that you can use against the API which I know is not for free but we’re working on it. I make that promise every year and never come through, but I’m still fighting the good fight.” FIGHT ON!

So all the guys like Delicious are all talking web services, lists MS Virtual Earth and Yahoo and asks “Has anyone heard of mashups?”

How might web services look in Product X, a potential future product from Blackbaud focusing on fundraising built on the Infinity platform? Took the web services extensibilty mechanism of Infinity platform loaded up a new component that use both Yahoo!geocoding, MS Virtual Earth and Blackbaud and when I hover over the map, it’s actually an example of an AJAX-y web services call where all these guys are talking together and it’s plotted this point on the bird’s eye view of Virtual Earth. We’ve done some really cool mashups with like there seems to be a section cut out at around 12:48 in the mp3 where Shaun is about to talk about other mashups. Another great example is how you might integrate with a search API. A lot seems to be really censored during the 13:20 to 13:40 section. It’s a sloppier set of cuts than anything during the Soviet regime.

Infinity will be on SQL Server 2005 exclusively. We’re going to exploit all the features exclusively.”We’re not going to have an Oracle story for the Infinity platform. We are focusing on Microsoft.” It’s our strategic database technology going forward.

RSS

Long discussion about RSS and Podcasts and IE 7 and Firefox being good consumers of RSS. Microsoft is going to add some domain-specific features. They adorn the RSS fields with what fields are in it and what fields are sortable. So here’s an application that’s tracking some sort of reunion dinner events. And when I click it’s going to fire up IE 7 which can feature this feed and since we use simple list extensions, we can actually sort. Picture any consumer of RSS along with extensions to the spec, you can do some interesting things. “Second possibilty is for actually integrating loosely coupled systems — message delivery type things.”

IE 7 works with RE 7.812 and this is true with RE: Anywhere but Shaun needs to get back to the question with that.

AJAX is orthogonal. “We are going to use AJAX more. It’s just a richer user experience. Well, our position on that with the Infinity platform is that we want the richest user experience that’s Web-delivered, hence we’re doing what’s called a smart client…but there are some applications that we’re really going to heavily employ AJAX. A big one will be Netcommunity 5.0.”

Shaun goes on to show a code listing that accesses Raiser’s Edge via web services.

“XML — that’s the plumbing between all of this…” He admits that SOAP is somewhat Microsoft-centric. ” Just because we’re a SOAP app provider doesn’t mean that you can’t have a REST-oriented Web service.” There’s other possibilties for exposing the data, something called JSON and Shaun proceeds to show the data in a JSON format. He probably lost the audience there.

Has anyone heard of microformats? We will be able to use microformats.

Smart Client

We’re betting on smart client technology. There’s some bad things about it. Heavy footprint, hard to deploy, DLL hell. BTW, our installs are now .msi installed so you can use SMS to install.

Mac is not a key tenant in the platform design. You need a Web connection and a Windows operating system as a client. Our bridge strategy is exposing our APIs via web services.

Things will get streamed down so if you alter the main app, the changes will stream down to all the other clients. Compares trying to do batch in RE versus doing it in browser. “Imagine hitting the back button — oh my god, what happened?”