Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of visible changes to show off, but a lot’s changed under the covers that I’m hoping should make future development easier.

• Got rid of NHibernate; I think NHibernate could be great if you need to do a lot of ORM heavy lifting, but I think it’s overkill for what I’m doing right now and was just adding unneeded complexity.  Things that I could normally whip up a SQL query for in five minutes were becoming evening-long investigations into NHibernate mappings and syntax.
• Upgraded to MVC3
• Started switching views from WebForms to the Razor view engine
• Switched to a more service-based tiering, rather than having the UI layer talking to repositories

I also decided to scrap the idea of doing a Blackberry-specific app altogether.  When I started, geolocation was the one key thing that the BB browser couldn’t do that justified doing an app (insofar as I wanted to be able to access things with a device I own).  With OS6, it’s just built into the browser so there’s no reason not to just make a mobile version of the website that will work on all modern phones.  I’ve spent a bit of time on this, but there’s nothing really to show off yet.

Finally, I signed up for an account on bitbucket.org.  I’d been self-hosting a Subversion repository and bug tracker before, but the opportunity to switch to mercurial and have someone else look after things seemed too good to pass up.  So far I’m pretty happy with the service, though I’m not making a whole lot of demands of it.

For common beers this probably won’t make a big difference (at least in cities with lots of establishments); the establishments you’ll see will be the same ones you would have seen before.  If you’re looking for something a little less common though, you’ll now get results even if those results are 200km away.  Then it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the drive

I also changed permissions so that anyone with an account can add new establishments and beers (you can create an account on the site).  I’m not sure how this will work in the long run, but until the site’s popular I’m hoping I don’t need to worry about people adding crap to the database.  For the time being, I think the biggest thing is making it easy for people to add stuff to the database.

The first version of the BlackBerry app is coming along.  I’m hoping to have something that’ll perform basic searches finished by the end of the week, but we’ll see how things go.

Once it’s up and running, I’m going to set it up as the primary domain for the site and make the others redirect to it.  I think it’ll be a lot easier to tell people about the site when I can just say “whatsontap.ca” instead of “watsontap.net, but there’s no ‘h’ in ‘wat’”.

If you’re interested in helping add to the database, create an account on the site, drop me a line, and I’ll set the role for you (new accounts aren’t moderators by default).

Hopefully this makes things less confusing for first-time visitors; the old “default” location when browser detection failed was lat: 0, long: 0, which is a point in the ocean off the coast of Africa where there isn’t a lot of beer for sale.  If you didn’t change your default location, it kind of just looked like the app didn’t work very well.

The server geolocation makes a call to a web service provided by IPInfoDB.  For now it seems to be pretty snappy (and it only needs to do it the first time a user visits), but I’ll probably switch to a locally-hosted database when time permits.

Unfortunately, now the browser-based detection gets preempted when really I’d like it to be “Plan A”; changing that’s probably going to mean reworking the home page.

I also added some more establishments, mostly in Oakville.  Most Oakville pubs list their beers online, so they’re populated in the database.  Waterloo pubs don’t list their beers, meaning I need to get to work on some serious pub crawling, I guess.

It’s fairly sparsely populated with a few bars in KW, most of which don’t have their full-compliment of beers (if they have any beers) listed.  If you’re trying things out, “Guinness” is probably a good beer to search for to get any results.

If you’re using a recent version of Firefox or Chrome, your location should be auto-detected when you visit the site.  Otherwise, you’ll have to set your default search location in the top-right corner.  On search results pages showing a search radius (the blue/purple circle) you can re-center the search area by right-clicking on the map.

Until I get more checks and balances implemented, you need to be logged in as an administrator to add or modify Establishments/Beers.  If you’re interested in helping populate the database, send me an email and I can set you up (the site has a registration page, but users aren’t admins by default).

Next up is getting a basic Blackberry App working.