Could you pls comment before we start our mobile+server project?

Question

Hello All, We are a team of four CS undergrad seniors developing a mobile app (+ the web-based servicing architecture ofcourse) with the following intentions: (1) Its our Degree Project (Thus comes, UML Modeling, Documented Testing & other specification reports) (2) Our chance to learn & solve issues ranging from UI, data mining, AI, TO product-marketing!

At the end of the day, we wanna see many people globally, benefiting from it.

Could you please comment on the tool set we are using?

(1) Java + Eclipse + Android Plugin (ADT) & SDK (to start with) (2) Various web-services SDKs (3) On the server: ?? (dunno yet) (4) For other artifacts: IBM Rational Modeler

any resources you think shall be better/helpful? Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: We shortlisted UML/MDT extensions of Eclipse instead of IBM Rational Modeler

Answer 1

How will you manage your feature/task assignments? I would recommend Google Code if you don't mind allowing your tasks assignments to be public.

Otherwise JIRA is a good alternative (only $10) that my team has started using recently, though I have mixed thoughts about it. A different team currently administers the install so we haven't been able to customize it to our needs.

As for the technical architecture, I would need to know more about your project to make recommendations. Make sure you think about high level components and requirements before selecting technologies.

UPDATE: Without knowing exactly what you need to do on the server side, I would say a good technology to consider using is Spring Core (and possibly some of the other Spring modules). Spring will still allow you to use POJOs, but allow you to construct your application using dependency injection - which ensures your code is loosely coupled. Spring is worth learning - it promotes good programming practices and is used it many Java apps today.

Answer 2

That seems a pretty typical setup. If you were doing this professionally, the next addition would be version control; Subversion is probably the most common.

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Edit: If you're looking at the "free" price point on a Java server, Tomcat and GlassFish are the first three to mind, I think JBoss also offered a free/evaluation copy.

If you want a server you'd be hosting remotely, Java is one of the more expensive languages to host; PHP is probably the least expensive to host, with Apache being the most common server.