[ipn-devel] IPN, take 2

[Jonathan C. <jon...@in...>]

Wow, it's been well over a year now since we've communicated about the
Intentional Prayer Network project.  I thought I'd e-mail an update to
let you know that this project really isn't dead.  Hopefully your e-mail
addresses haven't died since then.

Things just didn't seem to click for us with the steep Turbine
learning curve and so I've been doing a LOT of thinking and waiting on
God for the proper timing of things.  But some good things have happened
in the meantime.  Brandon Freitag (Chicago) has joined the project to
help with the technical aspect of getting a dedicated Linux server going
as well as the marketing aspects of the project.  Check out the new logo
he put up at http://www.intentional.us.  Nothing is in stone, so comments
are welcome.

I'm writing partly to find out where you are technically, and partly to
share the direction of our thinking on this project. I'd really like to
hear from you whether or not the following new technology direction fits
with your existing skills that you use on your job.  I've learned that
it's important to find volunteers (including myself) who don't need to
scale the learning curve of a new tool.  Few developers have the time to
learn complex new tools (like Turbine) in their free time.

In my job I have a bit of free time now to work on "new" technologies.
I've been using JBoss entity beans and session beans with XDoclet and
I'm also looking to gain experience with a code generator like UML2EJB
(sourceforge) and it's successor AndroMDA (Andromeda, also at
sourceforge).

I have previous experience with EJB CMP when I worked at is.com so I'm
relatively aware of the strengths and pitfalls of EJB development and the
importance of tuning.  So, at the moment we are thinking that the data
layer should be JBoss CMP 2.x entity beans and the business service layer
Session Beans.

I am currently planning to have working data services (data, business
logic, etc) built by May (that's not very far away).  At that point, I'm
hoping that we can find some Struts and Swing developers to pick up the
ball and build the UI portions.  Then I can be free to tweak the data
service APIs as the UI developers reveal needed modifications.

If this was the technical direction that we were to take this project, how
does that fit with your existing skill set?  And how much interest and
availability do you have in helping out with this project?  I'll be very
interested in hearing from you.

Take care,

Jonathan Carlson
Minneapolis, Minnesota