Smixit is an information network called the “Universal Data Exchange”. At Smixit people are linked together by shared information and interests. It’s a platform for finding, creating or exchanging any kind of information. You can view your data in different ways, combine it, mix it, present it or share it securely.
The cornerstone of the front end work, and the bulk of my role, was as the lead on a team of developers building a cutting edge Rich Internet Application (a really big AJAX program) to access the datastore. The client really nudged at the limits of what’s possible with Javascript and AJAX.
It was an object orientated program built on top of the Prototype and Base libraries. The program ran to in the region of 50 classes and 15,000 lines of code. It included a large number of custom built DHTML features, including inplace editing, lightboxes, navigational trees, free moving windows with gravity and manipulation of tabular data. The Javascript client also required a carefully constructed architechture (based broadly on MVC) including neat features such as a cached data model and lazy loading of Javascript.
UPDATE: Sadly, having not quite found niche in the market, Smixit lost it’s funding at the end of February 2008 and the project will be discontinued. Still, I’m proud to have worked on a visionary idea and I’m also proud of a lot of the work we produced.
