Where Is Forgbook Going?

Of my large (and still growing) handful of projects that I’d like to be working on right now, Forgbook is taking up most of my attention. Hopefully I can get some kind of super-early release out in a few weeks, but until then it’s worth noting a few shifts in focus and philosophy.

As much as I love the Web, I find it hard to submerge myself in Web development due to the chronic pains of browser incompatibility, and perhaps the need to be constantly responding to user experience. Once a product is released, I feel an obligation to keep it updated, which can at times conflict with a desire to put a project to the side for a while. It’s much safer in term of user response to work on a project privately until it’s complete and polished before releasing it rather than releasing pre-alpha kind of work and iterating consistently all the way through to a final release. I guess I value my flexibility pretty highly, because after all this work is effectively my free time.

Forgbook is (or will be) my largest, most ambitious project in functionality terms, and I believe it will be of the most value to myself and others, so I want to get it right. I’ve been thinking about what I want it to offer for some time now, and I’ll be updating the project page with more details as I solidify them. From a technology perspective however, the interesting decision I’ve made is that I’ll be switching from a relatively unambitious attempt to combine Flex and PHP to a Web-native Django application leveraging the Dojo JavaScript toolkit for the more flashy UI components. This means however that I have to familiarise myself with the environment Django offers; it’s immediately clear that it’s extremely powerful and scalable, but the decoupling that is its strength results in a variety of idiosyncratic idioms that will take some time to adjust to.

Why the switch? One of the requirements I’ve come to be very passionate about is making Forgbook accessible from any common device – PC, smartphone, tablet, perhaps even consoles – so that it feels more like an encouraging companion rather than a chore you must log into every day. This is best achieved using a native Web interface (HTML, CSS, JS) over something requiring a plugin (Flash, Silverlight), as it should at least be accessible by any device with a Web browser, in the scenario that I don’t/can’t customise an interface for that device. It would be suicide to jump into creating a sophisticated Web application without a framework, and my love for Python (and mere tolerance of PHP) combined with the popularity and support for Django make it a perfect choice. The integration of Dojo via Dojango is a big bonus too.

I’ll document the progress I’m making with Django in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully get a stripped-down-but-working version (basic user and task management) out in the wild before March. From there, I’m hoping the development efforts will feel more rewarding, and I’m sure there will be many more fun things to handle (feedback and reflection followed later by advertising and analytics). I’m looking forward to it as much as ever.

P.S. If anyone can think of a quality name for a sophisticated event/task management application (Forgbook is very much a working title), let me know (comment or contact). If I like it enough that I decide to use it, I’ll be happy to give you free access to pretty much anything I release forever. Hopefully one day that’s worth something significant.