Feb
09 A little progress
Well, a bit of an update.
I'm coaching a basketball team (my son's Grade 7 team), which takes up some brain space on Mondays (practice) and Wednesday or Thursday (games). They are just beginners, but that's fine, so am I :-)
So today I just got started on a database schema, and then had to plan my offense. The practice went okay, but the kids need way more repetition before they do the offense naturally. So hopefully they at least have fun.
mysql> show tables;
+----------------------+
| Tables_in_northcreek |
+----------------------+
| event |
| participant |
| party |
| time |
| type |
+----------------------+
These tables will be the start of a generic framework that allows me to create business applications using metadata rather than code. At least that's the plan. I need a template system for the UI (View), a workflow system for the Controller, and an extensible, Universal data model for the Model. My goal is 1 day turnaround from requirements to prototype. So Monday requirements meeting with a client, Wednesday demo of those requirements in a production app.
If I can get this to work, then I should be able to undercut commercial business accounting software and still make money on support contracts. But we're a ways from having a Quickbooks feature set. That's the target, though.
I may use Qt as the development framework - cross-platform development including smart phones and Java. It depends on if I can figure out how to template a dynamic UI that runs off of metadata. I know I can do that using web technologies, but that introduces servers and browsers, etc., which is not all bad, but might be overkill for a small office.
I've also downloaded Scala to play around with - the alpha geeks have given it a thumbs up, and it runs in the JVM, so I can integrate it with everything else out there (including Spring). I'll keep this blog posted - I just completed a Hello World app that actually ran in Eclipse :-)
Bedtime for the kids. Out.