Who did it?

The site was developed by, Richard Nichols, a local, Melbourne-based software developer. Richard studied Computer Science at Monash University in Clayton, and has worked in software engineering in Melbourne for more than 10 years.

That isn't to say it was done single-handedly - much advice, feedback, testing and ideas were contributed by Richard's wife, Sophie, friends and family. Feedback and discussion is probably the most important part of the software development process and a lot of different ideas came together into the current version of On My Doorstep.

Why did you do it?

"On My Doorstep" was developed for the AppMyState competition, run by the Victorian Government as an initiative to encourage innovation in applications that benefit the Victorian public.

The initial version was built in roughly 2.5 months, in spare time, after work, and on weekends. It was probably a fairly ambitious idea to create such a broad concept site in such a short time window (not being able to work on it more than couple of hours per day).

Part of the AppMyState competition's calling, was to open up a bunch of government data sets and say "here you go, what can you do with it?". That's a great idea (more government data should be open), and so the "On My Doorstep" tried to make as much use of these data sets as possible. It made sense then to try to build a site that brought together as many of these data sources as possible in the one place - in a sense, to build something to be a consolidated and local view of all these government data sets.

The rough design sketches were of a site that would let people see "what's on their doorstep", i.e. what's going on in the local area. A place where anyone could go, and find out something new and useful about where they live; "inside knowledge".

That initial idea changed a great deal (and is still changing), but the core idea of the site remains the same - a local site, for local people, about local stuff.

How's it work?

"On My Doorstep" was created using the Apache Wicket web framework. Richard has a great deal of experience with Apache Wicket and is also the creator and maintainer of the "visural-wicket" open source project, which is a set of components and tools for Apache Wicket developers.

The site also makes heavy use of the Google Maps API, Google Charts API, Facebook Connect API and uses a lot of open-source tools such as Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Google Guice and warp-persist.