Mauro Pirrone | Blog

I have developed Karozzi.co.uk for an assignment as part of the Web Science topic held at the University of Malta by Dr. Alexiei Dingli. The main objective of this assignment was to build an innovative e-government website which interfaces or gathers data from existing services in order to provide additional value.

Basically, this website aims to integrate the government car registration with the popular AutoTrader website by providing an extremely user friendly interface. Searching and valuation of cars is done efficiently and fast with a small, known sacrifice in accuracy.

Links:

• AutoTrader
• ADT Car Valuation

Some new websites have been launched during the last few months. These include:

Damcar Properties - A website for a startup real-estate business.
DigiMalta - Website for Microsoft’s local digital heritage competition.
Giuseppe Picture Framing - Small website which aims to serve as an online gallery for picture frames, picture mouldings and art.

The first edition of the Digital Arts Awards was held on November 7, specifically honouring for the first time the digital arts and media industries in the Maltese Islands.

The awards celebrate creativity and excellence in a variety of disciplines, such as advertising, graphic design, print, audiovisual, photography and the World Wide Web.

I was part of the winning team honouring the Digital Arts Best Student of the Year Award for the Microsoft Imagine Cup project. I would like to thank the University of Malta, MITA for sponsoring our project, and finally but not least, my colleagues James Abela, Keith Galea and Brian Fenech, who have dedicated hundreds of sleepless nights to make this project successful.

Press Release: http://www.timesofmalta.com/technology/view/20091119/news/the-best-local-digital-creations-recognised

A few months ago I have discovered the new Microsoft technology called Dynamic Data. It is a web development framework which is suitable for rapidly building data-driven websites (or web applications).

The main feature of Dynamic Data is definitely the scaffolding feature. It works in conjunction with either LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities. It adopts the “Don’t Repeat Principle” by using what are called page templates and field templates. Everything is modular and you can easily re-use components. It is much like Ruby on Rails! We have to admit that Ruby on Rails is more complete and it supports MVC out of the box. On the other side, the nice thing about Dynamic Data (unlike RoR), is that everything is integrated within our friend Visual Studio :).

In general I believe Dynamic Data is suitable for building small web applications where performance is not an issue or if you are not dealing with huge amount of data. Personally I found Dynamic Data useful for rapidly building customised content management systems. Although, I had a learning curve it was worth it and will be using it in future projects.

We expect Dynamic Data to improve in future. There are also companies such as Telerik which are already creating controls for Dynamic Data. If you would like to find out more check out the offical website.

If you have used Dynamic Data and you would like to share your experience, feel free to leave a comment.

It has been a long time since I’ve updated my blog. Since my last update, I launched some new websites. If you’re interested to find out more, please check my website here: http://www.pirronedesign.com

At the moment I am working on a couple of new and interesting websites and I am currenly doing research on data clustering for my B. Sc. IT (Hons) final year project.

I will try and keep my blog up-to-date, so please check back later

Dear friends,

Competitors from all over the globe have “imagined a world where technology has solved the toughest problems facing us today” and have spent the last year making their vision a reality through innovative software solutions. These finalist teams have competed and were crowned the best in their respective country or region. Each of them will be travelling to Cairo, Egypt to compete against one another at the 2009 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals. Although industry leaders will be given the difficult task of determining which team will be this year’s winner, we want to know what YOU think…

The People’s Choice Award was created to showcase the Software Design finalist team’s solution and to allow YOU to have a say in which team you think should be on stage as the winner in Cairo. Let your voice be heard.

On behalf of the Maltese Team, LogicArts I invite you to visit this website (http://peopleschoice.imaginecup.com/default.aspx) and vote for our team. NB: Ideally you should use Internet Explorer and you can vote once a day.

Please support us by forwarding this email to all your friends.

Thanks for your consideration.

All the best,
Mauro

Imagine cup is an annual student technology competition supported by Microsoft. This year’s theme is “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.”

My team which consisted of James Abela, Brian Fenech, Keith Galea and myself on behalf of the University of Malta, developed a system called DonationExpress. In a nutshell, our project will integate existing shopping carts with one, global trusted source of donations and allow donations to be made quickly and easily upon a checkout. The system also includes a web portal to display donations in a transparent way and track how donations are spent by charity organisations.

Yesterday we managed to beat MCAST and STC in the Imagine Cup local finals held at Hilton Conference Centre. The panel of judges consisted of five local industry professionals namely Jonathan Cassar from MITA, Adrian Porter from Exigy, Joseph Borg from ICON Studios, Steve Giordano Imbroll from 6pm and Steve Casaletto from Key Services.

Our next challenge will be in Egypt were we will be competing against teams from over 100 countries!

Other Links:

• http://imaginecup.com/
• http://www.maltamediaonline.com/?p=8149
• http://www.donationexpress.org

Click here to visit website

These are tickets which I’ve designed for a beach party held on September for Malta CTS.

Blog.com.mt is the first Maltese Community of Blogging. Yesterday it has been featured on TVM News. Here’s the clip recording of this feature: