IBMi and RPG, meet WorldVision and LivestockMN

I am pumped. You know how you wait for that absolutely golden project to come down the pipe – the type where you work early mornings and late nights because it sings so true to your heart?  Well, that project just landed in my lap and I am super pumped.

A little history is probably in order.  The past 5 years I have been part of a team that puts on the annual LivestockMN event.  My responsibilities have mostly been in the area of lining up bands to play at the event, but this year somebody else is going to take that on and

I instead am taking on the donations role (i.e. the process of accepting cash/check/credit at the event, tallying up totals, providing updates to the bands on stage to announce to the audience, etc).  Well, me being the geek I am decided that we needed more technology involved to streamline processes for the day of the event.  So I thought “why not create an app so people can donate from wherever they are at during the music festival“.

The app I am going to create will be mobile based so that not only can event organizers accept donations at the various booths using iPads and the like, but people sitting in the audience will be able to hit that same site with their smart phone and submit their own donation right from where they are sitting!  And not only that, when they give a donation they can add a little message like “I just bought a goat!  Hurray for cheese!“ that will be projected on a large screen up by the stage that will convey totals and messages from the audience (messages will be filtered of course ;-).

The front-end will most likely use Sencha Touch and the backend will be RPG with DB2 on IBM i communicating with a 501c3 PayPal account to process the credit cards.  Cool eh? :-)

I’ve had this project in the queue for a couple months and the reason I got so excited recently is because I had a call with one of WorldVisions IT Directors to discuss this effort and they are going give me any resources I might need and hope to collaborate throughout the effort so they can do similar things and even maybe use some of the code from this project for their mobile efforts!  That’s why this project has become so cool – it aligns my profession (geek), my favorite platform and language (IBMi/RPG) and my belief in Jesus and his teachings which is where volunteer organization (LivestockMN.com) and my favorite non-profit (WorldVision) come into play (i.e. helping those in need).  Does it get any better than that?

Stay tuned for an article series that describes how this project was accomplished from start to finish.

FUN FUN FUN!!!!

AaronBartell.com