Developer’s Corner - Everything up until now
Tuesday, 5 August 2008
Here’s a quick history of the development of the project. At the time of this post, all development for this project has been done in free time, before and after our “real” jobs. There wasn’t a concentrated effort by a team of developers, it was Tim and me working it out.
When I first started in late 2006, I only had about 6 months experience developing, so things were very rough. I was developing on a xampp server on my laptop. Within three months I had a basic program going which implemented a simple authentication library, the name of which escapes me right now. However there was no overall application framework, and being a noob, I made it very very procedural. I quickly learned the problems with managing code written in that manner, and made a decision to scrap everything and restart using a framework to provide base functionality and organization structure. After some research I decided on CakePHP, a rails clone.
I spent several months redeveloping the project. Using Cake’s handy bake function greatly sped up the process of development. Late last year a lot of the pages and functions were together but something wasn’t quite right. Tim kept on saying “There’s something missing” and “It’s just not clicking”. I realized that the nature of this project was more game-like, where the user experience was based on quick fire interactions, not on browsing. What I really needed was to build an RIA. I had some experience with building a simple Ajax RIA, and scaling it for this application seemed like a headache. When I discovered Flex I realized it was exactly what I needed. I reworked all the views (webpages, essentially) to feed XML to the Flex application, and began developing the authoring application in Flex/Actionscript 3.
It was a longer process than expected, but now we’re getting close to the launch. There are missing and half-baked features, but eventually you just have to take the plunge and hope for the best.
In my next post I’ll discuss some of the existing and planned features of the application,
