One of our big projects at work just launched: the VitalSource Store. James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark have posted about what it was like working on this project. My favorite posts include this one about the Rails development sandbox, and this one about RESTful web services.
Ryan also chimed in earlier this week about the project. It feels good to write about work in this space for me too, something I have rarely done but will likely do more as our company becomes well known.
Although the software is now freely available like iTunes, we’ve all been hard at work on this stuff for a while now. In fact the current Mac and Windows clients started life over 4 years ago, and there is a bunch of shared code in there from our internal tools that is older still. We’ve been shipping product to customers the whole time, but it feels good to now open things up to anyone.
If you look below the surface, there is a pretty incredible foundation that we can build good stuff on top of. Comments like this one from Anarchogeek hit on exactly what we are trying to do:
“What’s amazing to me is how the vital bookshelf is a slick mix of a web / desktop application. It uses html, javascript, and css, but it also uses native windows and interface elements. It’s very nicely done.”
Thanks to everyone who is posting their thoughts. You can see more by searching Technorati for VitalSource.
