I have been waiting for this day since January 2010; today was one of the milestones of my thesis work which I started in January 2010 (but I have been working on this project since late December). The idea is simple, it’s a software which uses information collected by various sensors communicating to the system via GPRS and to make use of that information which is vital for business use. This is applied to the demand driven waste collection industry where collecting fill levels from trashcans can save the end users time and money as well as give them the chance to raise the quality of the system. This requirement was floated by Chalmers school of enterprenuership back in Nov 2009, I applied to this project and got accepted for the role in December 2009. The name of the application was coined by me to emphasise the two aspects of it, tracking and routing based on that tracking.
I cannot discuss the idea or the solution in more details due to NDA. I hope that later I can publish more details in public since I need to write the whole thing in the form of a thesis any way. But I would like to mention is the choice of technology for this project. This project could have been done in almost any platform as the client never had any specific requirement. I proposed JavaEE (Spring/Hibernate) for the following reasons
- Familiarity (I have been working on Spring/Hibernate for some good time now and I am familiar with how things work)
- Portability (the solution produced by this stack is highly portable, can be run in any environment based on tweaks, starting from Google App Engine to good old Unix server)
- Reliability (the systems produced by this stack are under use all over the world in like of Financial, Datawarehousing, corporate IT industries)
- Tooling (with advent of spring ROO and STS getting free we now have very good tooling support to rapidly prototype enterprise applications, I will talk about my experiences with ROO a bit later)
There are so many other good reasons to use Spring/Hibernate stack and those reasons can be found in various white papers and case studies published by spring source. Overall I am quite happy that I had a chance to learn lots of new things. Now the not so fun part of actually writing a thesis has begun which I have to deliver by the end of this academic year (Aug 2010). As of today I have officially wrapped up my work for the software portion of my thesis, lets see how many bugs popup during the next few months.It has been a nice learning experience so far and I hope to be a part of this project in the future when it goes commercial (in real sense).
