Kieran Senior

• Published:March 12th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Pages

This afternoon I was given the chance to show off my final year project in its current state.  There were far more people than I expected, there were more people than I could actually talk to but fortunately a lot of people just crowded around my desk to check out what was going on.  I literally got the project working properly about ten minutes before the event started.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to check out other projects, and the ones that I did see belonged to other departments and so weren’t in my subject area.  Also, I didn’t manage to get any pictures which was a shame, I’m sure there are some floating around somewhere though.

The project itself is a virtual whiteboard capable of sharing vector-based graphics written in Java over a network connection.  In its current state it can share two types of shapes, an ellipse and a rectangle (and rounded rectangle) with a selected colour.  It’s fast, and uses a decent MVC architecture (thanks to Sinbad for the insight into that).

A variety of people approached my desk, some from the industry, others from employment agencies, and some professionals just taking some interest.  I received a couple of cards from companies asking me to give them a call, although it won’t be any use as I live overseas and don’t have the chance of moving in the next year.  Another comment I received from a "professional" was that if I wasn’t using serialization then I wouldn’t have any port/Socket issues blocked by firewalls.  The truth in that statement is beyond me, I didn’t think the Socket cared if serialized data was sent over a network connection, it doesn’t know what the data is, it just knows there’s data being sent/received.

Other people wanted to receive updates on the current status of the project and whether I would take it commercially.  My plan is to actually release it open source and continue work on it in the future as a side project.  It’s a large field and interests me greatly, I wouldn’t mind taking it to the 3D realm either.

I missed the winning prize by two votes and there was no "second place" prize either which was a shame.  I enjoyed the event though and it was good to see how interested people were in projects like this.  As it’s a very visual application it’s very easy to grasp what’s going on.

After university I expect a sourceforge page will be created for this project as it advances further.