What's new

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Wow. What's new indeed.

Welcome to Weather Now 4.0, a ground-up rewrite of the entire application (except, obviously, the user interface design). Here's just a sample:

• The application now runs on Microsoft Windows Azure, up in the cloud.
• This means it also runs on Azure SQL Database instead of on-site SQL Server.
• Since we had to port the database anyway, we completely re-architected it.
• The database rearchitecture included moving its archives to Azure Storage, which will pay benefits once we update the UI to take advantage of it.
• The ancient (1997, with revisions in 1999, 2002, and 2005) GetWeather application, which downloads weather data from outside sources, got rebuilt from byte 0 as well.
• Fixed 35 bugs that the old architecture either caused or made fixing overly difficult.

In all, we have (so far) spent 97 direct hours over three months on this update, with another 24 hours spent on changes to the Inner Drive Extensible Architecutre to help the effort along.

You can read a lot of the technical details on The Daily Parker. We're just happy we've finished this effort.

So what's next? Look for a few things later this year:

• A redesigned, modern, mobile-friendly user interface.
• REST-ful access to data.
• Personalized weather: users will be able to create their own lists, places, and email notifications.
• Expanded climatological data.
• Additional data sources for more complete coverage.

We're also thinking about bringing back flight logs, not seen in the Inner Drive universe since 2003.

Thanks for your continued support. (Keep in mind, this is a volunteer effort; every contribution helps!) We're excited about this new application, and we're glad you're here.