TBA Digital Logger

Overview

The TBA Digital Logger is a desktop application that I built as an employee of TBA Digital Inc. The custom application provides extended functionality to the company Intranet/ERP in several ways. Its primary purpose is to track employee efforts specific to projects and sub-tasks. This information is communicated in real time to a central server in order to continuously update project actuals so that they can be accurately compared to estimated costs and timelines. Additionally the logger provides a custom, private instant messaging service with file transfer, and group chat functionalities. This can be used by employees to instantly and securely communicate between themselves, or by the company to send automated notifications to select employees as a result of key event triggers within the company intranet software.

Technical Specifications

The client side of the logger is a fully skinned, multi-threaded, Java Swing based application built using the MVC design pattern. The client communicates with the central server using an encrypted restful API that returns the JSON file format, as well as manages loss of connection & asynchronous synchronization tasks. Instant messaging and file transfer functionality is provided by the Smack Java API, and is powered in the back end by the Openfire IM server that communicates using the XMPP instant messaging protocol. For easy deployment, the binaries are bundled into a MSI installer for Windows, and a native application for Mac OS X users.

My Contribution

My involvement in this project began during the concept phase. I helped advise business owners on the opportunities and limitations of various technologies, as well performed all research into suitable solutions technologies. From there I liaised with creative to offer opinions on various design considerations, and then took those designs and built out the entire application, as well as performed all necessary server side installation and configuration.