It is definitely an improvement to the old site. Previously when searching for the band daryllann, there were no results whatsoever. The new site now changes the incorrectly spelled band name to the correct spelling. This means that the site is more forgiving to spelling mistakes. This should help conversion rates. Although….. the album Renko found on Bol.com is not the correct album: Renko…..bol.com still have to sort out some data issues.

Revamped product sections

All product pages are revamped, but especially the games, DVD and music sections look hugely different. The site looks and behaves the same across the different product groups now.

I love the feature that you now can search for children games or hardcore games. Ordering a PEGI 3+ game for a four year old is not what PEGI is about. PEGI rating just sucks™

Shopping basket

The shopping basket and checkout has pretty pictures.
Nice eye candy.

Pretty urls
http://www.bol.com/nl/p/games/metal-gear-solid-4-guns-of-the-patriots/1004004006052238/index.html
Bol.com has got rid of all the ugly urls they used to have. SEO to the max.

Payments
Unfortunately the Postbank was experiencing problems which caused problems with my Postbank credit card or iDEAL payments. This killed some of the experience, but this is not something Bol.com can help. It was handled gracefully on the bol.com site. My Visa card had no problems whatsoever… Good… good..

Next steps?
ATG and Endeca transformation almost done.  Time for the next phase….

<checkvaluematches
    value="${@java.lang.Integer@parseInt(configList.length)}"
    comment="Number of configured Endeca instances"
    pattern=".*" />

or constructions like

 <checkendecaservice host="${configList[0].host}" 
   port="${configList[0].port}" query="N=0"   comment="Endeca instance 1 connection test"/>

The ${configList[0].port} is a typical OGNL construction.

The CheckEndecaService can also return the Endeca com.endeca.navigation.ENEQueryResults response.
With OGNL you can easily dissect this Endeca response.

This can be extremely handy to query for the latest Forge or pipeline version of an Endeca build in the different ATG environments were you cannot directly access those services! For instance in production.

Missing a database table here, a JNDI binding forgotten, a URL not reachable, weird classloading nightmares, because another jar is being used in acceptance.

Here is where SelfDiagnose comes to the rescue. Somehow this little gem gets no press whatsoever. Lately some new tasks have been added to the mix. This blog by Ernest explains something about compile-time dependencies. But more interestingly (to me), SelfDiagnose now contains an CheckAtgComponentProperty task and a CheckEndecaService.
The CheckAtgComponentProperty lets you check an ATG property. I know this can be done with ATG’s component browser as well, but hold on.
The CheckEndecaService will check the availability of the Endeca service.

The combination of these tasks and the chaining of these creates a powerful diagnosis. See the following snippet of code, where first an ATG property is queried which then is chained to the Endeca task. Another nifty SelfDiagnose feature.
This code is heavily customer oriented, but you will get the idea.

    1 <checkatgcomponentproperty
    2     component="/wsp/common/services/search/balancer/connections/EndecaConnection"
    3     property="host"
    4     comment="Endeca Host"
    5     var="eneHost"/>
    6 <checkatgcomponentproperty
    7     component="/wsp/common/services/search/balancer/connections/EndecaConnection"
    8     property="port"
    9     comment="Endeca Port"
   10     var="enePort"/>
   11 <checkendecaservice host="${eneHost}" port="${enePort}" query="N=0"/>

The real cool and not so well understood part about SelfDiagnose in my opinion, is that it will check a bunch of tasks from inside the environment you are executing. This means that the above example will output the ATG configuration and check the configured Endeca instance of the actual environment.
Hitting the selfdiagnose.html url will show:

I just mentioned the ATG and Endeca tasks, but there is a lot more which can be extremely helpful.
This nifty feature can save some energy when something is misconfigured. Checking the selfdiagnose URL can save a lot of time.

I know I will use it.

Darryl’s commuting habits need a faster car.

Endeca spec

When using Endeca for search and guided navigation it of course often happens that Endeca is implemented and the specification is trundling behind.

During discussions with business representatives about Guided Navigation (aka dimensions and precedence rules) a bit of documentation is definitely necessary due to the dynamic behaviour of Endeca. That dynamic behaviour can be a tough cookie to demo. So a functional description becomes necessary.
Especially so when a test team comes along and wants the specification in a human readable form, perhaps to write the test scripts.

So I wrote a little Ruby script which parses the Endeca dimension files as produced by Endeca Developer Studio and dump them as a tab separated dimension hierarchy.

This produces

like structures.
A bit of extra text and you are good to go.

I wonder

Will the test show a difference between the specification and the implementation? This can be a nice test of the test script.