Focused Literature Search

I think that I have narrowed down my literature search. I started this project in panic thinking what should I search for and how. Typing Taxi Booking Software wasn't likely to return anything of any real use to me.

The advice to focus on the project and the sub tasks involved certainly helped to provide me with some focus. I became clear that this was to be a distributed project, with one server and several clients. Additionally the clients would be running on different computers and not necessarily on the same network, indeed they might be running over the web.

This lead to me looking into RPC (remote procedure calls), we had previously implemented this using CORBA in Java. However a quick web search indicated that things had moved on. There seemed to be a big debate about SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol or Service Oriented Architecture Protocol) vs REST (Representational State Transfer). There was also a related debate about XML (eXtensible Markup Language) vs JSON (Javascript Object Notation).

As a result of these debates it seems that REST is considered the simpliest and lightest weight method of implementing client server communication. As a result I am focusing my literature search on REST to better understand it and how to implement it.

The debate about XML vs JSON seems on similar lines, that XML is too heavyweight for simple tasks like data transfers. However it comes into its own for document transfers. I will probably use JSON for data transfer as a result.

The second part of my literature search resulted from the fact that I have little experience in project management, as a result I have reasearched various methodologies, and I am going to focus on looking at AGILE and XP Programming. I realise that neither of these methodologies is going to fit a one man programming outfit exactly, but I hope that there are aspects that I can apply to my project planning and development.

I am going to consider these papers along with my life cycle choices.