I’ve managed to completely miss my original 14 day time frame for launching babysittinggroup.com. Life (family, friends, work and the open source developers conference) has taken up the best part of the last week. My new target is to be in beta by this weekend when the next Barcamp Sydney is happening. On the Sunday they’re having an entrepreneurial track for people to show their latest software / project / beta and I think this would be the perfect place to launch.

There has also been some good news in the last few days. On Friday I spoke with our HR manager and it turns out I can operate babysittinggroup.com as a business. Once the site is in beta I’ll revisit the business plan.

There was minimal progress today as life got in the way (again) . I’ve managed to complete the user registration/login/logout/password recovery with unit testing. In the real commercial world I would have been forced to drop the unit testing to meet the deadline by now. I may still do that but it’s nice for the choice to me mine.Today has also made me question if MVC really is the best way to write a web application. While I understand the value of separating the business logic, controlling logic and view logic, all of my actions look exactly the same:

1. Create a model representing that page
2. Save data to the model
3. Have the model process the data
4. Transfer the result to the view

Once I’ve finished this project I might look at model-template-view to see if that offers any improvements.

So far the Easter long weekend has been more of a problem than a help. No work got done on Friday or Saturday. Sunday was a lot more productive and the UI is almost complete but I’m now so far behind my 14 day schedule there is no chance the site will be ready to launch in 14 days.

With the UI close enough to complete I’ll turn my attention to writing code to validate user input and glue it all together. Any outstanding changes to the UI can be completed as I get to those pages.

PS: Even this post is running late.

The start of week two sees me finally move the project into Subversion and Trac. I’ve been extremely lazy about setting these two up. I’ve also been working on the UI which will probably take another day or two. That only leaves four days to finish the project so it’s starting to look like I’ll be running at least a few days late

As predicted not much got done yesterday. Today I finished all of the DAOs/DTOs plus unit tests. While progress appears to be slow a lot has been accomplished. I’m so use to commercial pressures where clients/bosses are more interested in new features or see the UI evolve that being able to write and test the core business logic before creating the UI seems strange. Over the next couple of days I’ll flesh out the UI and decide on the final look for BabysittingGroup.com.

Day 4 was spent writing more unit tests and business logic. It will take another day to complete this. Sadly tomorrow I’m going to be busy with OSDC 2008 duties so I probably won’t have anything to post.

For those of you wondering why this is taking so long, it’s simply because I’m doing this in my spare time. That means I’m lucky to get 3-4 hours per day that I spend on the project.