Howard Abrams

V.P. of Engineering

DigiSlice Corporation

I started DigiSlice with Dr. Wm Leler and Joonees Chay and officially launched the company January 2003. We purchased a product tool from WebGain called Application Composer to use as a basis for our own AppComposer product suite.

Online Documents
Some documents I wrote for DigiSlice. These documents were confidential during the existence of the company.
AppComposer Presentation An introduction and demonstration of the AppComposer product and how it builds web applications from reusable components. Web Service License Scheme DigiSlice's OEMs and VARs wanted to license AppComposer, but also have it branded by their company. In order to allow these companies to license the product to their customers, but still allow DigiSlice to control the licenses, I created a web service client bean for them to use to access a web service. This document gives a high-level overview of this process. Product Release Notes AppComposer v3.0.0 AppComposer v3.0.1 AppComposer v3.0.2

Online Documents

Some documents I wrote for DigiSlice. These documents were confidential during the existence of the company.

AppComposer Presentation

An introduction and demonstration of the AppComposer product and how it builds web applications from reusable components.

Web Service License Scheme

DigiSlice's OEMs and VARs wanted to license AppComposer, but also have it branded by their company. In order to allow these companies to license the product to their customers, but still allow DigiSlice to control the licenses, I created a web service client bean for them to use to access a web service. This document gives a high-level overview of this process.

Product Release Notes

Upon starting the company, I had four primary goals:

Organize the company infrastructure
Resurrect and enhance the AppComposer product
Help marshall the sales and marketing teams for promoting the new product
Plan for our next generation product

In order to increase communication between the business and engineering sides of the company (a problem I've often seen), I put together a small "internal portal" that would take emails, work journal entries, IM transcripts and generated reports and create a summary listing based on date (see this screen shot).

Each employee, from commissioned sales people to contract engineers, were given a "work journal" for them to keep public notes and other information. These turned into "home pages" that aggregated the person's calendar events, task lists, and other information (see this screen shot).

AppComposer

Our primary product was a tool which built web-base applications by assembling Java components (see this screen shot). The source code we received was in complete disarray and took months just to locate all of the code. I hired some excellent engineers, and over the next 8 months, we:

Ported the product to Linux, Mac OS, and other Unix versions
Branded the product for 3 OEMs
Added a number of features including updating the interfaces to all the latest API specifications.

The product was licensed to a few resellers, some software vendors specializing in Java components, and two OEMs that wanted to bundle the tool with their development hardware.