Peter White - 2003-08-08

I'm currently in the process of organizing and structuring my thoughts and materials (mockups, data model, requirements, design goals, process/methodology, etc) in a format that would be readable and meaningful to others. My personal goal is to have this done by 8/24/03 so that the people who've already expressed an interest in this project can get involved and build momentum while we're all still motivated.

From a technology perspective, I'm planning on using Struts or a similar MVC-based framework with JSP (JSTL or JavaServer Faces) or XSLT as the presentation layer and either JDO or Hibernate on top of MySQL as the persistence layer. Ideally, with minimal tweaking, it could run against any relational DB back-end supported by the chosen persistence layer but MySQL's free and I'm trying to target the widest audience possible. I've decided to avoid using EJB due to the added expense and maintenance burden it would place on the application users.

From a process perspective, I'd like to run this project with a light-weight methodology along the lines of a cross between XP and RUP. I haven't formalized the process yet but I want to make sure that the number one priority is releasing a product that everyone can be proud of - something that you would want to include in your project portfolio if you were to go on a job interview. From my experience, any process is better than no process and I want to make sure this gets documented and adhered to so we don't adopt a hacker mentality.

From a team perspective, I'd like to initially start with a small team of 3-6 intermediate to advanced developers and hopefully a documentation person, UI designer, and as many testers as possible. Good communication is also a necessity due to the distributed nature of the team.

If you're interested in joining the team, please send me a brief description of your skills/experience and technical interests so I can get an idea of where you would fit into the project.

Thanks!
Peter