Posts Tagged ‘RedFish’
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.
Last Post of 2008… Oh, Wait… First Post!
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
iVolunteer is a free location-aware iPhone application that makes it easy for people to find one-time volunteer opportunities and get involved in their communities.
With the participation and support of Boulder’s awesome tech scene, we are in a great position with iVolunteer. Dave Angulo has rewritten the server back end, the development of both the website and iPhone app are progressing, we have secured 501(c)3 status as a component fund of The Community Foundation, and we have a data sharing agreement with the Hands On Network which utilizes their new API. We were very fortunate in the timing of our agreement with Hands On Network, as we contacted them right as they were making significant changes to that API. With Dave’s background in web service development, we were able to give them some timely advice on how to make their service more scalable and their API most useful to their data consumers.
While the data from Hands On Network is enough for us to meet our requirements to launch (“one-time low-commitment volunteering opportunities covering the entire US”), our hope has always been that our database be as large as possible. To that end, we’ve had very positive conversations with VolunteerMatch and are continuing to reach out to the American Red Cross, United Way, and other sources for event data. Please let us know if you have any great leads with folks in those organizations!
Creating iVolunteer is an all-volunteer effort started by Dave Angulo and Rich Grote. We would be nowhere if so many talented folks hadn’t volunteered their time and amazing abilities to making the project a reality. Thanks to Bracken Christensen for the sweet logo, Andrew Hyde for his awesome design work, Ryan Imel for turning that design into CSS, Chris Browne for his work on the iVolunteer website, and Aubrey Francois for his contributions to the iPhone app. Brian Burns is our master wordsmith and Gerhard Rivera has shown an inspiring willingness to step in wherever we need.
People are drawn to the startup scene for three main reasons. To make a bunch of money, to work on something cool and important, and to work with awesome people who are fun and wicked smart. Since iVolunteer is going to be given away at the App Store for free, we can’t do much for the first one. But we’ve definitely got the last two handled.
To continue to make this project social and move quickly, we’re setting up a weekly informal meetup at RedFish Brewhouse on Tuesday nights, beginning January 27th. It’ll be part hackathon, part technology discussion, part group blogging adventure, part strategy session, and all fun. No experience necessary, just bring your enthusiasm. More details to follow in additional blog posts, join us!
Subscribe
Twitter
Facebook
Wordpress Plugin
iPhone OS App
Contact Us