BookedIN.net

It’s been many months of coding and even more months of planning but the time has come for some publicity.

BookedIN is the name of the application we’ve been working on since the beginning of the year. The logo should give you some clues as to what it’s all about. The short version is it’s a scheduling system for small businesses though we do have long term plans for . This is the part that will generate revenue so we can fund that effort. Yeah, yeah, I know. Some startup we are, wanting to actual build a business rather than play with technology. What can I say, I’m risk averse that way.

The app is built on Google Web Toolkit which has been an interesting experience. One of the primary reasons we settled on it is because our application was going to be very heavy on the AJAX and my partner, having come off an extremely large web app, was gunshy about straight-ahead JavaScript, even with jQuery or MooTools. So the allure of GWT was too much to ignore.

During this time, I’ve also been doing some side work on an MVC project and it involves a heavy dose of JavaScript. jQuery has made this process easier though I’ve never disliked JavaScript as much as others.

The way I write JavaScript is pretty different than how I do C#. For JavaScript, it’s a little more off-the-cuff. I need a button to retrieve data from the server so I’ll throw in a $( “#loadData” ).click call in $( document ).ready( ) and away I go. When I’m done, there are a whole lot of magic strings and “var jsonData = <%=Model.EventsAsJson%>;” and parsing code and while the code works and was fun to write, I don’t get the same warm fuzzy feeling I used to.

It’s an unfair comparison between this process and what we do with GWT because what I *really* should be doing is writing JavaScript properly and applying a decent test strategy to it. All the same, doing the same thing in GWT feels like it gives higher odds for falling into the pit of success.

That should be enough tech talk to allow me to justify this as a non-marketing post. Huge thanks to the team for pulling this together. Future BookedIN-specific posts will be on the company blog.

Kyle the Booked