Posts Tagged ‘JAXB’

You’re using what???

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

This is the first of many posts on one of the fun parts of working on this project, hacking on it. If this stuff makes no sense to you, but you want to learn, that’s okay! Leave a comment, drop us an email, or, if you’re in the Boulder/Denver area, drop by one of or meetups Tuesday’s 5pm at Redfish.

Part of the fun on a community-created project like this is the ability to stretch your wings and try new things. Yes, we could just slap this thing up with a bunch of boilerplate well-known recipes, but what’s the fun in that? Instead, we’re creating this project using some cool new technology that will be fun to work with. What follows is a quick overview of each piece of the technology stack that we’ll be using on the iVolunteer/ActionFeed project. Although some of it gets a bit technical, hopefully it’ll give you some understanding behind the technology decisions we’re making.

First off is one of the the stars from last years Apple WWDC: Sproutcore. What’s not to love about a javascript MVC framework that lets you build Cocoa-like interfaces? This is the tool set that’s behind Apple’s MobileMe experience. Not only does it use OO javascript, but it also heavily uses observer patterns similar to Cocoa programming (I’ve read, never having developed a Cocoa app). Sproutcore was at 0.9.19 when we started the iVolunteer project, but then the Sproutcore team went for a Halloween Strategy to announce they will rework large sections of it for a 1.0 release. Love being out on the bleeding edge? This is what its like!

Next, both the iPhone App and the ActionFeed website will need REST interfaces from a service in order to get the data to present to the end user. The service will also need to connect to our providers, grab a data set (Please let it be structured!), do any necessary data mapping and throw it into our database (aka ETL). It would also be nice if the service had some administrative interfaces to control the service. There are lots of ways to skin this cat, from the current rage of RoR to writing a cgi, but we wanted to experiment with some cool new stuff coming out of the Java world in Jersey/JAXB/EJB3. Also, if we do end up being successful, running in an app server container should make scaling simpler (in theory).

Of course, the crown jewel of our technology is the iPhone SDK. There are tons of thing to cover on iPhone development. Whether you are an iPhone SDK veterano or just now hoping to get started, we encourage you to come on out, meet some great people, and get your hands dirty working on something cool that’ll help the world.

That wraps up the key technologies we’re using to develop v1.0 of iVolunteer. I’ll dive into each in more detail in upcoming posts. Please comment and let us know if there are things of particular interest so we can start there first.

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