Vacation Tracker on Android - LungoJs

After hanging around a lot with PHP and CSS, development of web apps for PC's got somewhat monotonous. Hence, I decided to move on to develops web apps for the tablet and the smart phones. Being the possessor of a Sony Xperia U, Android was the obvious choice of platform. Instead of hard coding the entire application with javaScript I decided to use the framework called LungoJs. The first look at the framework convinced me that it is definitely cool, but lack of documentation and support made it really cumbersome. It took a hell lot of time for me to figure out how to use the Framework. At this point I must tell you that it is not at all that tough as I felt, its just the lack of support.  
 The application itself is very simple. The routine is stored in a MySQL database. All I need to do is to update the routine if I'm absent in a particular class. The absent dates are stored in the database. The application automatically calculates the percentage of classes I have attended in each subject and warns me if I'm low on attendance.

The application is currently in alpha stage of development and major features have already been implemented. The last module that I'm working on is trying out a algorithm that will help me to plan my classes so that I can cope up if I'm low on attendance. A bit of AI ;)

Taskware

Finally my first corporate based application reaches testing phase. Taskware, as it is being called, is an advanced task management application that synchronizes all your tasks, projects, contacts and notes over the network. The thing that really makes it different from other task management softwares is that every part of information can be shared over the network with someone if necessary. Few additional features that makes this application special is its cloud storage - file sharing system, the internal messaging system and the accumulation of contacts sensibly. Security has also been taken ample care off, as corporate solutions always require neck tight security.
I'm looking forward to the results of the first real time test of Taskware over the National Institute of Technology Durgapur servers somewhere in the near future.

The Taskware Dashboard

Client side validation vs Server side validation

It is quite a fun developing a web application this summer for NITD Alumni. Working at such a professional level is tough, but it definitely teaches you plenty of new stuff.

While working on this project I came across a major problem with validation. Since the application is supposed to store profiles of alumni's and present students, we need a lot of validation work. Any wrong data will make the database useless, and also we want to put the best user experience forward. So the idea is to give the user the least number of controls and still collect the most amount of data possible.

Initially, I decided to use client side validation using javascript as that would speed up the process as well provide an enhanced user experience. But how much I tried, javascript was easy to hack and anyone could submit garbage data into the form. So finally it was decided to do server side validation using PHP.

Now to make our plans, we did both client side and server side validation. The obvious question is how will this help! Well the client side validation does most of the work, make the interface fast to use and gives a superior user interface. On the other hand the server side code gives a secure backend. So the before the data is written onto the database, the server side validation makes it foolproof and writes it down.

Hence, for a site to work out proper and secure validation techniques, it needs to have both client side and server side validation.

P.S. For those of you looking for client side validation, look out for the jquery.validate.js and additional-methods.js. They contain almost all the necessary validations. And obviously you can write down a few of your own. :)