Skip to main content

Making Connections: Responsive Systems & Neil Sedger

Image
By
Everyone knows the monthly Norfolk Developer meets attract speakers from around the country to talk tech to us, but we were reminded recently that we also have a more practical function. To bring like-minded programmers together. One such successful collaboration began in March last year between John Heaser of Responsive Systems and freelance mobile developer Neil Sedger. The conversation they had resulted in a wildlife tracking app, which has recently been published on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
John posted in the NorDev Meet-up group that he was looking for help with a Cordova phone app and then decided to attend a meet-up himself. “I went along to my first NorDev meeting on 25th March 2015 and during the pre-meeting beer I overheard Neil talking about Cordova – so I asked him if he was interested in working on the project and he said yes, he had some time available, so I was very lucky! There are five of us working at Responsive Systems and whilst we have good skills in some areas we can’t be experts in everything! Neil helped us get started on the project – he is a nice chap to work with.”
“I’ve used Cordova on a few projects now” says Neil “It’s great for quickly building a cross-platform mobile app, especially if you already have a responsive browser-side web front end. It’s not for every project but it’s worth considering.”
Neil describes the app as a wildlife database with an built-in questionnaire to help users identify a creature they have found. “ ‘Dragon Finder’, has been built for the wildlife charity Froglife who are dedicated to the conservation of amphibians, reptiles, and their habitats. Users are encouraged to report sightings of creatures which can include location, habitat description and photos; this is uploaded to Froglife’s central database which they use to monitor populations, spread of disease and non-native species, and feed into other conservation projects.”
“We have brought in outside help on previous projects” says John “and I believe that co-operative skill sharing between small software businesses will play a key role in making Norwich a centre of technical excellence and that NorDev can facilitate this.”
Check out the finished app here:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...
1 comment
Read more