F1 Dashboard released

In last few months I was working on a little personal project. When Google App Engine team announced that preview of Java version is available I decided to give it a try. When I was looking for a subject of my application, one of the ideas started to emerge more that others. I was looking for a web site that could aggregate all the information about Formula 1 racing. Because there was none available (or my Google search ended on first few results that were not satisfactory) I decided to make one.

Few weeks and cups of coffee latter F1Dashboard.com is released.

Generalities

So, in few words, F1 Dashboard is agregator of news, and media feeds from world of Formula 1. I decided not to collect content, just store information where to find it and short description.

News are harvested from a number of web sites. Twitter updates serves as another source of news.

Images are comming from Flickr, videos from YouTube.

All updates  are happening every few minutes and are 100% automated.

Technicalities

GAE supports Groovy as one of JVM programming languages. I decided to give it a try. I love Groovy, it is somewhere in between a friendly and known Java API and Ruby programming language.

It took me a moment to use to BigTable type of DataStore. It restrictes a way I used to work with databases normaly. Google provide entire environment for local development, whitch means I don’t have to upload to a cloud to see working result.

I created a little homegrown Model Views Presenter/Controller framework and used StringTemplate as rendering engine.

jQuery is the library of choice to handle all JavaScript.

Page styling was done by a friendly and kind designer from Circa82 Michael Austin (thanks buddy).

Come on guys, give it a try and tell me what you think 😉 Feedback greatlly appriciated. http://www.f1dashboard.com

Cheerios, Greg