Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Web Application on Resources in the Cloud

“What? Why? When? How?” are the four questions I am going to answer to introduce my first series of posts.
  • What? I am going to build a modern Web application using resources on the Cloud. Specifically, I am going to build an open Web application for consumers to find and review products in a big database, and for producers to offer products and find consumers. The infrastructure will use Google App Engine infrastructure [1].
  • Why? There are many aspects:
    • There is the professional benefit: In my post about Gary Reynolds' presentation “Career Advice '08” [2], or as posted by Tim O'Reilly in his post “Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles” [3], it is mentioned that delivering value is a key differentiator. Building this working application will demonstrate my various expertise.
    • As an active member of Diku Dilenga [4] which delivers microloans to small enterprises in Democratic Republic of the Congo, I know that such application will help microentrepreneurs finding customers, and vice-versa. This project helps sharing my expertise with people who need help.
    • This project gives me also a chance to contribute to the open source community which has already given so much to me, my life, and my work.
  • When? I have already played with the Google App Engine SDK on my machine. I wanted to be sure no blocking issue would prevent me building the application. The application is already available at: http://prod-cons.appspot.com/
  • How? I am a Agile Methodology Adopter [5] so I do not plan far ahead. I am going to prepare a backlog with the tasks to implement, and I am going to address them according to their priority order. The code is regularly pushed on github [6]: http://github.com/DomDerrien/diku-dilenga/tree.
If you like the idea, if you want to learn new mechanisms, if you are OK with writing lots of unit tests, contact me. Because I am pretty busy at work, and I have to assume responsibilities for Diku Dilenga, the project will move slowly. But it will move and it will be fun!

Hints on the coming post in that series:
A+, Dom
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Sources:
  1. Google App Engine website.
  2. My post on Career Advice '08 
  3. Tim O'Reilly post Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles.
  4. Diku Dilenga website.
  5. Agile Manifesto, and Agile Methodology description on Wikipedia
  6. Github.com offers free hosting of open sources (charges applied to personal and commercial hosting).

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for your support. Being always pertinent is challenging, especially when you don't have much spare time and you still want to keep your blog alive. I've the draft of the entry on i18n. Will I be able to publish it before the end of this month? Stay tuned ;)

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