Starting from a blank slate on day one would be a little daunting and no doubt we’d spend a fair chunk of the week trying to decide what we’d like to build before even getting on to planning how to build it. So we decided to make a list of the technologies we’d like the chance to try out and use that to give us some direction in the sort of app we’ll be building.
We came up with the following list:
- Touch interaction for tablets and smartphones
- HTML5 canvas
- HTML5 local storage
- NoSQL (ravendb)
- SignalR client-server real-time interaction library
- HTML5 web workers for background processing
- JavaScript reporting libraries
- Rapid HTML form authoring
- Responsive (CSS media queries) and mobile (jQuery mobile) UIs
- LESS or SASS CSS framework
- ASP.Net MVC
- .Net Entity Framework
- JavaScript MVC/MVVM frameworks such as Backbone and Knockout.js
- CoffeeScript
- Mercurial source control
Trying to find some sort of pattern in those technologies, we are looking at creating an application with these traits, giving us the chance to touch on as many of the above as possible given the time we have:
- Both desktop and tablet/mobile UI with touch interactions
- Offline mode
- Graphical interactions, i.e. not just standard form controls
- Real-time client-server interactions
- Pretty reporting
Pretty broad scope, but it gives us the foundation for our idea, which needs to be something that would benefit from those traits.