One Month Ahead

It is exactly one month ahead without much progress. And I am starting again.. NOW.

Officially, I have stopped developing the new application. I am kind of relaxing and taking stock of what I know and what I want to do further. 

Next Steps

As said previously, I have released the first version of the VGuide App. I have to add some more features to it to make it complete. The most important feature is notifications. I have observed that the timezone should match the client's timezone. So I need to take that into consideration. But for first, I will try to get it done for Eastern Time Zone. If atleast I can add notifications, it will have atleast the minimum viable product. Also, I need to add the option of adding the previous tasks by default.

For that I am reading up on the notifications API here. I want to complete notifications, and getting the old tasks directly by end of this week. i.e March 25th.

First version of Django App done

I have finally completed the development of the application. Slowly I am catching the way how django works and was able to complete the development fast. Though I am not very competent enough about all the various design patterns for Django, I am now able to develop a CRUD application fast.

In my previous post, I said that Django might only be suitable only for content based applications to which Dave Martorana, an experienced Django developer said that - "there is nothing which can't be done in Django" which was very reassuring to me. Thanks Dave.

I am happy to mention that I have completed an initial version of it and deployed it to google app engine.

It is not yet complete as I have to add one more feature which alerts the user every half an hour to remind and get information on what is the task he is doing. Initially I was planning to do that only on smartphone but now I think since Chrome has background apps as well as notifications, I can do that in the browser itself. Not sure if I will do this first in browser or smartphone but I will do both of them.

The app is no way perfect. I have used the basic template from Smashing HTML5. thanks to them, because I didn't know how to create a good UI. Still I was not able to make the error messages and the register page look good. But I figured since functionality is done, I will do well to release it out in the world.

It is not ready for primetime yet. I will surely let you know when it is  :)

But adventurous people can check it out.

Is Django not suited for web applications?

Django project was created by a news organization for their internal use. It is so heavily geared towards content i.e showing content which is the main aim of the news organization. So it always talks about posts, books and content in its tutorial. I am learning from djangobook.com and I have to say though the book is good it is taking time for me to wrap my head around the concepts as it doesn't directly map to the j2ee web app concept. I mean it has forms and everything but everything is looking complicated from the eyes of a beginner like me. I read from railstutorial.org and it was a very good book to start learning Ruby on Rails and it was mapping very well with J2EE web applications. So getting started with Django for building a web application is difficult compared to building it with Ruby on Rails. I want to give up and try something else but I am trying to press ahead and build something.

It looks like Django is more suited for content based web sites rather than logic and calculation heavy web applications atleast that is my initial thought. 

Developing a Web Application

I am learning Android and I am quite interested in creating a productivity web application. I want to create a web application and provide android and other smartphone apps for it. So for developing the web application I am trying to build a web application. I wanted to learn a dynamic language from long time and I thought this was a good opportunity. So I picked up python. My idea was to write an application and deploy it in Google App Engine. I chose to write the application in Django which can be hosted for free on Google App Engine. So I patiently spent the half of February learning Python and the last two weeks learning Django. With a lot of effort I was able to get a static page up and running. It is a crud application but to develop it is taking a lot of time. Still a longgg way in becoming an efficient developer. I want to work on developing fast web applications which can scale well. So this is the project. I will detail on what is the application I want to develop in my next post. 

Learning Python

Hacker news (news.ycombinator.com) has permanently changed the way I look at my work in office. It got me interested in development, start ups, web design and hacking. So after deliberating and sitting in the sidelines for a long long time, finally I decided to do something even if it is a crap product. I have developed an android application ( nothing really great, just a very basic crud app which still has some bugs) but it really was a  great thing because instead of just thinking about something without doing something, I overcame my laziness to develop an app. Now I want to integrate a web application with to collect stats and store them for future. I want to develop a time tracking app. So I looked about whether to learn ROR or Django and finally decided to learn Django. So for that I have to learn python which I started doing. I am reading diveintopython written by Mark Pilgrim. He is providing a very fast tutorial to python. I have completed reading half of the book and I am practicing a little on the side but I plan to complete it by end of this week and I will prepare a ppt for my quick reference and share it.  As i have said, this is a quickreference to python basics.