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Experiencing Sencha Touch: VW Dealer app

Sencha Touch, a high-performance HTML5 mobile application framework. We used Sencha to build an iPad application that allows Volkswagen field managers and dealers to show customers everything about VW cars. Application features: Work offline. Update application data without reinstalling the app. Support multiple events. Capture customer information locally and upload to server later on. Vehicle gallery and videos slide show. Vehicle trim specs, color specs, technical specs, pricing. Vehicle comparison.  Since this app needs to work with iPad 1st generation, memory management became very important. We spent good amount of time to tweak the app to have small memory footprint.  The app is being used at places with no wifi. When the application is installed, it downloads all data from a server and stored on the iPad using HTML5 local file system feature. App uses high quality gallery images, so using manifest method would exceed the browser storage limit. The app its

VW Merge & Purge campaign

This application uses Javascript framework backbone and several APIs built using PHP. I was working on the backend PHP with MySQL. The one major component is PHP GD image. All the Facebook feed images are generated with dynamic information using GD.

iPhone app: real time video sharing

An native iPhone app prototype that steams camera video between two iPhones. Not very complex, but it took a good amount of research and learning. Major classes are NSOperation, AVFoundation and GameKit. Multi-threading is necessary to prevent UI lockup, so NSOperation is used.  AVFoundation - (void)captureOutput:(AVCaptureOutput *)captureOutput didOutputSampleBuffer (CMSampleBufferRef)sampleBuffer fromConnection:(AVCaptureConnection *)connection is the key element to capture video frames from camera.  GameKit peer-to-peer communication via Bluetooth is used to send and receive data between two devices.  Result was that I was able to reach about 4 frames per second. Did not get to try Game Center peer-to-peer via local WiFi. I believe that will increase the frame rate.

NodeJS and real time communication application

It is always fun to try out something new. This time I had time to create a prototype game that uses NodeJS server and PubNub API. Multiple players join the game to answer a movie trivial question. Whoever answer the question correctly first gets to control the movement of a real object remotely. Players that do not win can keep playing the game while the winner controls the real object. The server app keeps track of the winner, game status and the real object status. Making sure only one player has access to control the real object.

Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture

Went to Yahoo developer meetup last week. Nicholas Zakas was the speaker that talked about how to build a scalable javascript application. There are some key points I’d like to share. First is the overall architecture diagram. Nicholas mentioned loose coupling is important to make an application scalable. A loosely coupled system is one in which each of its components has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the definitions of other separate components. Only the base library knows which browser is being used.  Only the application core knows which base library is being used  Only the sandbox knows which application core is being used  The modules know nothing except that the sandbox exists  No part knows about the web application The advantages of such system are Multiple different applications can be created with the same framework.  Each part can be tested separately.  Replace any parts do not break the application.  The following link is Nicholas’ fu

Fresh and Easy Shop for Shools Admin Tool

This is one of my biggest .NET project and I am happy with the end result. This project has 12 database tables and 50 stored procedures. This application is completely Ajax and web services driven. I also used EJS Javascript template engine. Main functionality including: Administrator activity log Find possible duplicate school records. This is done using Full-text search against school name and address Search schools Result pagination Update 1 or more schools at a time Add new school attributes Create and update admin users Multiple user level with different permissions Export school data to Excel