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.

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

Here’s a link where you can find a list of the most popular programming languages. The index is updated on a monthly basis and these are calculated by search engines such as Google and MSN.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

From the top 20 list, I currently make use of Java, C#, PHP and JavaScript

Java


public class HelloWord {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(”Hello, World!”);
}
}


Here are some advantages:

• It’s open source and platform independent
• Endless list of libraries - many of them are free or open source
• Free and well supported tools such as NetBeans and Eclipse
• It’s mature and used in many real life business applications

C# / .NET

class HelloWorld {
static void Main() {
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}

Here are some advantages:

• .NET Framework is advanced and well designed
• Faster when compared to Java
• Meta Attributes which are very powerful
• New way to define get/set methods - much more intuitive
• New way for code documentation using XML

PHP


echo 'Hello World!


Here are some advantages:

• It’s open source and platform independent
• PHP applications tend to be faster when compared to C# / Java
• Lots and lots of free libraries
• Many open source projects are written with PHP such as Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress