Drowning in Debt

Posted By: Michael Eisworth on August 31, 2010

In Software Development, much like in Finance, having too much debt can be a real burden. In developing software there are trade-offs and reprioritization so that you can deliver the most business value in the shortest amount of time. When a feature, fix, or enhancement is deemed necessary but not urgent, and is thus delayed, there is a future liability created. Likewise when functionality is implemented in a way that will have to be refactored in the future an expense is incurred. This expense is called technical debt and refers to the eventual, additional development that has to be done at some point in the future to finish a particular piece of software.

It is easy to draw parallels between technical debt and financial debt. Most people understand the concept once explained even though the actual technical debt can be difficult to identify since shareholders may have different opinions as…

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Intro to Ruby on Rails

Posted By: Jas Singh on August 24, 2010

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language that makes it easier to develop, deploy and maintain web apps. Rails uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming.
It includes tools that make common development tasks easier “out of the box”, such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a simple ruby web server, and Rake, which is a build system.

Together with Rails these tools provide a basic development environment. One of Rails’ biggest strengths is metaprogramming, Rails introduces the Active Record framework, a design pattern by Martin Fowler. The rails version of Active Record discovers the columns in a database schema and automatically attaches them to your domain objects using metaprogramming. Rails also relies on convention over…

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API Strategy & Roadmap

Posted By: Scott Lowrie on August 17, 2010

Looking back, only for moment…

Almost a year ago to the day, Fellowship Technologies deployed the Fellowship One REST API into production. We were excited to achieve this milestone since it represented months of dedicated work by our development team. Since then committed developers, vendors, and our own staff have come together to form a Community dedicated to bring solutions to the church world. I am encouraged and edified by the fantastic work that has been accomplished. Good work!

If you cook it, then you better be prepared to eat it…

We believe that the best way to prove our API can accomplish what others need it to accomplish is to use it ourselves. No… I am not talking about for just some things like a mobile app that does this, or a CMS shared login, or vendor solution integration. I am talking about using our own API for the…

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Staging/Sandbox Environment is Back up!

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 11, 2010

Sorry for that downtime, but good news…it is back up! Go have fun creating with the API! And we want to make sure we give credit to our awesome TechOps team here at FT for getting the environment back on it’s feet. That’s a group of people that do a ton of awesome work and you rarely hear about!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

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Downtime in Sandbox/Staging Environment

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 11, 2010

Just a quick note to let you know that we are currently experiencing some unexpected downtime in our Sandbox/Staging environment. Sorry for any issues that may cause you, we’re working to get it back up as soon as possible. For the quickest notification when it is back up (and a lot of other great stuff), please follow us on Twitter @F1Dev!

Thank you for your patience!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

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Android & OAuth

Posted By: Kelly Klein on August 10, 2010

If your Android application needs to implement OAuth there are many options available. The one that I’ve used that I like the best is signpost. It’s simplicity allows it to stay out of your way while you focus on implementing your applications functionality instead of worrying about how OAuth works.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll have to do is download the signpost library. You’ll need both signpost-commonshttp4 as well as signpost-core. Save these to your hard drive in the lib folder of your project. Now add both libraries to the build path of your project and your ready to go.

Here We Go

We need a class that will implement the signpost library to make calls to the API to retrieve our data. The way this is implemented in Fellowship One…

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F1 API Static Library with Objective-c

Posted By: Chad Meyer on August 3, 2010

At Dynamic Church 10 Conference I had the opportunity to collaborate with some awesome developers / peeps from around the globe in the church market. Our conversations focused on using objective-c to communicate with the FellowshipOne API in order to build native iPhone applications.

Building an OAuth wrapper no matter what language is not trivial. Remembering all the business rules and connecting all parts together to make properly signed requests can take some time to perfect. Other avenues would be integrating with other third party libraries in hopes that everything their code does works for all scenarios and that it will pass Apples submission tests. Not to mention the fact that iPhone does not take advantage of memory management so the developer is responsible for properly allocating and releasing objects.

After some thought and research, we at Fellowship Technologies decided it would be slick to…

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