I’ve had a pretty good week. I’ve been totally engrossed in a project I’ve been working on since getting back from Xtech last week. Essentially I’ve been working on a spike with Andrew and Hardeep to extend the functionality in our Project Cenote concept car.

The purpose of the spike was two fold. Firstly to try to better understand how to build a funky new set of features into Cenote, and secondly to allow the members of the team become familiar with and experiment with some technologies that they aren’t familiar with.

In fact it felt quite good leaving work today, having gotten to the point where the little prototype is pretty much feature complete. What’s really impressed me isn’t necessarily what it does (which is cool!), but the speed with which we’ve been able to put it all together. The spike was timeboxed to two weeks, but the reality is that the bulk of the implementation has actually been completed within the last few days. It’s by no means a production system it’s just enough to hopefully facilitate some of the discussions we hope to have both internally and externally … much like the first release of Cenote, which we Open Sourced recently.

The original version of Cenote was a read only application that allowed users to search for books and then mashed up the results with data held in various stores in the Talis Platform as well as external sources such as Amazon in order to provide users with some pretty useful information. This spike extends the original version by allowing users to use that data to create and share some really useful things.

I think there’s some important reasons why we have been able to put this together so quickly. The technology stack has been kept very simple – its just an application built in PHP5, running under Apache 2. Furthermore the application is built upon our Talis Platform which is constantly evolving and becoming more and more powerful. I’m not saying that just as someone who has worked on building that platform, I’m actually saying that as someone who has been using and consuming it’s services primarily to build applications with it.

When Rob and I originally wrote Cenote, we were both impressed at how easily we were able to use the platform, as it was then, to put together a cool looking application in the space of a couple of days. If that impressed me at the time, then I’m doubly impressed at how simple it’s been to create an application that supports creation, deletion and updating of data.