Making of Adobe Cricket Application - Behind the scenes..

The story began on 15th of March 2008, here at the Adobe Bangalore office.. Ramesh (The Sr. Computer Scientist), a senior member of the evangalism group for platform products (Adobe Flex, AIR) set up the first of its meeting for coming up with a next generation way of watching cricket. His idea was clearly documented (he is really good at it). The thoughts were clear and the idea made sense with nearly whole of India (just about 1 billion?) watching cricket with great craze.

Srini and myself were the developers assigned. Jyoti was assigned the manager role driving the deliverables of the project. Ananth (Director, platform products at adobe bangalore) was spear heading the administration and real-push of the idea with the higher level management. He for sure played a vital role for making it happen.

With-in two days, myself and Srini came up with our prototypes. Srini started with the Scoreboard updates with the initial data scraped from cricinfo.com into the database and then read through a parser and i came up with a Chatting module prototype with just two static rooms present in the chat/gossip cornor, a mechanism to express emotions towards a player and contest center. The mechanism to express emotions will go like this - while in chat room, you can show up a photo of a cricketer and throw a garland to him, flowers, throw a tomato that smaches on him or throw chappal expressing anger... This would be broadcasted to all your chat room users who are in that room. I've initially used the polling mechanism and the messages were being delivered at a really slower rate and after converting it to rtmp it was like a zoom.. it went really faster now.. yes, the protocol matters.

It was taken from there on. The Contest (Which is not part of public beta now) and the chat room, Feedback to the users, send a notification to friend, etc. were made by me. Contest was moved to a really next level with more and more complicacies added to it. A user can create a contest and publish it to its chat room users and count on the poll data, announce a random winner and send notifications all in one place. The backend is written in java using the remoting of lcds 2.6 early beta versions..

It then went on from there to a whole set of new features a new UI (thanks to srini to make it happen, it was not an easy job)... and a lot more... At some point of time we were in synch with yahoo, rediff, cricket nirvana... and its all going on now.. We've had several email exchanges and several processes in place and a whole new team to take care of the issues related to the application. A QE process in place was an added advantage, an early beta with-in adobe and a pre-release version, it all happened. It was a great moment that i missed (when it went live)...

While making of the application, srini and myself had many over-stretched time-lines (srini had the most as he did most of UI) and we were on track working on weekends without any pause :)

Happy to see it flying now.. great going..