Ask HN: Anything that you want built from 2 Java programmers free of charge?

[vtanase]

Hello, I have been lurking HN for some time now, and have finally found an opportunity to make a contribution. A friend of mine is going to be starting her first programming job in the middle of July and she lacks confidence in her skills, so I decided to work together with her until then and create a production ready project together. Since the good folks on this site always seem to need something built, I figured it was best to ask here and see if we could make someones day a little bit better. :)

Some info about our skills:

-me: worked for about 2 years in Java web application development, so I am familiar with things like Spring, Hibernate, templating engines, JUnit, Apache CXF, Apache web server and Apache Tomcat, CSS, Html, JavaScript and databases(particularly MySQL).

-her: she is going to start her first full time job as a developer in 2 weeks, these are some of the things she knows: core Java, HTML, CSS, EJB 3, JPA and JPQL (I believe she has some EclipseLink experience), Glassfish and Tomcat and some knowledge of databases

Given our 2 skill sets, I believe we could handle best building a web application or a web service, though we are open to other things if they are within our power to build.

Hope we can be of assistance to some of you.

tl;dr: we are 2 java developers looking to donate about 2 weeks of our time to building something that you need free of charge.

Regards, Vlad

P.S.: if there are project details that you are not comfortable discussing in the comments, to get my e-mail you just add .ro to the end of my HN username and add at gmail.com.

[mikepinto]

Restaurant Listing Website

I have all of the data on an excel spread sheet pertaining to my sample area. I have 90 Restaurants, the operating hours, the prices of food, the types of food, the addresses, contact info.

A website that could show people what they could eat based off of the amount of time they have available, the amount of money they have, and the types of food they would like to eat.

The website or app would be able to produce results based off of the constraints provided by the user, and my data.

Show Operating hours and update in real time

Show directions to and from restaurant

List genres of Food and Drink Type

Show User comments and recommendations by integrating Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter

Business Model would offer restaurants a subscription service to offer deals, news, to users. Advertisements may also be streamed to generate additional revenue.

[alliem]

An open source web app/tool for adult film actresses/actors to easily make their own monthly subscription based websites with an api that people can use as a basis for a smart phone app that does the same thing.

Pain Points: 1)Adult Actors/Actresses get maybe 1% of the long term returns on the content they appear in.

2)Making their own site, setting up a way to let clients pay, and figuring out how to get streaming videos to work, are all way too hard for the average performer and lead to them being stuck accepting the 1% mentioned above.

Note: I would use it for my site, as I am also an adult film actress (a transgender one) and this is something I plan to build for myself and my peers at some point in the future, and it would be great to just contribute to the open source project rather than starting from scratch.

[mrj010101]

hi am looking to create something like that, if you interested drop me an email: mrj010101 at gmail dot com

[ecubed]

Build something that not just an individual needs, but that the entire community needs. And bonus points for open sourcing it. Rather than asking what HN needs, instead think of what YOU need. I'm currently working on a project that I think other people would benefit from, but worst case scenario if I'm the only user, it's going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. Try and do the same. Obviously theres something you encounter in everyday life that you think sucks and could be fixed through a java app. Do that, open source it, and everyone wins.

[vtanase]

While I do agree with what you said as a general statement, I have found quite a few sticking points in applying this to web applications.

Firstly, I for one have seen very little interest in the open source-ing of web application code. I might be wrong, but as far as I know there are only a few bigger websites that put out their code (such as reddit if I'm not mistaking).

Secondly, to fix a problem with the skills we are trying to use(web development mostly) you need to host it, launch it and then maintain and manage the site. While getting what we build up and running would not be too big a problem, neither of us would have the time to invest in maintaining and managing the site. Therefore, we thought that it would be more beneficial to help someone with their backlog.

So, to sum it up, we thought of this more along the lines of: "hey, you know that thing that you have been thinking of building, but have been putting it off for months? pitch it to us and we'll make it for you".

[ig1]

A good geocoder.

Geonames has a good dataset of locations, and OpenStreetMaps has the regional boundary data.

So given something like "Boston, Massachusetts, USA" would take all the locations within the boundary box of "USA" and find the closest match to "Massachusetts" (using something like soundex), and then within Massachusetts find the closest match to "Boston" and return the long/lat.

[vtanase]

Hmm, a good geocoder sounds a bit ambigous to me. As far as I can tell geonames has an API with both XML and JSON for getting longitude and latitude off of city names, so I am not sure what exactly you believe can be improved by crossing data from OpenStreeMaps. Could you maybe clarify exactly what you had in mind?

[ig1]

When you query geonames for "Boston, Massachusetts, USA" it can do it correctly but only because it's data is manually hard-coded as Boston being inside Massachusetts. If there was some other administrative region that Boston fell inside than geonames wouldn't be able to handle that.

For example geonames fails for "Southsea, Hampshire, UK" as even though Southsea is in geonames and falls within the regional boundary of Hampshire, geonames doesn't have that knowledge. OSM has the regional boundary data which can be used for that purpose.

Also once you have that you can do looser matching. For example if you search Geonames for "Bosten, MA, USA" it won't find anything. If you used soundex for an approximate search for "Bosten" you'll turn up lots of unrelated locations, but if you did it restricting it to places in "MA, USA" you'd have a much better chance of getting an accurate match.

While this isn't such a big issue in latin-alphabet countries, in the rest of the world latin-spelling of smaller town and city names is often completely unstandardized so using exact search often misses the town/city even though it might be listed in geonames under a slightly different spelling.

[jfaucett]

I'd love to have a simple newsletter tool, with a backend administration interface that clients could use (WYSIWYG editor, etc).

[vtanase]

This sounds doable, shoot me an e-mail and we can see how simple is simple for you. :)

[derpmeister]

Parent is asking for a spam program, don't fall for it. Sending bulk email isn't trivial at all and there are already good solutions for it such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

[taligent]

How about building an open source activity stream app ?

http://500.co/2011/02/08/build-a-killer-product-faster-the-s...

Use Twitter Bootstrap for the UI and just have a simple generic REST service you can push activity events to. This would also allow you to get some exposure into WebSockets. Maybe even try and do it in Play, Grails, Vert.x etc for something different.

You could even turn it into a little startup.

[vtanase]

This actually sounds pretty interesting and I would really like to fiddle with this idea. The thing is right now it actually feels like biting off a bit more than we can chew. I might just come back to this idea somewhere in the future, since I find it really intriguing.

[shasty]

How about a front end to MongoDB?

[vtanase]

When you say front end to MongoDB, what exactly are you thinking of? This makes me think of something along the lines of phpMyAdmin, are we on the same page here?