Helping out with Egyptian elections 2011

Egypt is experiencing its first free elections since decades.

Egyptian Symbol

Egyptian Coat of arms

And I have decided to test if the web technologies practiced inside a secure enterprise network would also work in the real-Internet-world.

I got the permission to go ahead and use the API provided by the Egyptian government for the people to query their database for Election Locations, candidates  ,constituents and contests.

I got to learn a lot about the political map in Egypt and try to adapt my application quickly to different and shifting requirements.

I have made the following technical decisions:

  1. Use PHP and MYSQL . because that is the available platform I have
  2. Use the PHP framework Codeigniter . Which I have to admit, so far I’m enjoying that decision. Sometimes you feel there is a lack of documentation, but if you dig deep enough you will find your answers. anyway not bad for my first time.
  3. For Ajax and JS, I’m using the Prototype Javascript library. I have used JQuery before, but I had to go with Prototype because there is an AJAX library already available with CodeIgniter.
So Far I’m not getting heavy traffic on the site (only 220 queries) so the real load-test has not been reached yet.
My biggest problem so far is Marketing for the website. Unless you are willing to spend some money, nothing could be done beyond telling you network on Facebook and twitter about the site.

Anyway that is my experience about the difference between Enterprise -web and real-web applictions.

Looking forward to hear your suggestions and rating.

Ah, the website I created is : http://eg.maksoft.ch

categories Cool, PHP, Uncategorized | , 29 Nov 11 | comments Comments (1)