Vintage in Paris

Our Vintage in Paris app has been published on the Nokia app store!



The process was pretty simple, since it was a very technically basic but content heavy app.

The main difficulty in this app was walking around the streets of Paris taking pictures, and researching really good places to find Vintage.

Why a Vintage in Paris app?

Finding cool second hand and retro clothes is a hobby of mine, and my partners.   It's always fun finding interesting old styles, rummaging through clothes racks.  Especially in other countries, and especially when you find a bargain.




There's something special about wandering down some back alley, and finding an old shop stuffed to the rafters with old stuff.  It's like taking a journey back in time to some fantastical version of Paris you may have in your head.  If you like Art Deco stuff, then Paris is the place to get it.

What was the signup to the Nokia store like?

I have been signed up as a Nokia developer for quite a while already, so there hasn't been too much paper work, or forms to fill out.  I can't remember what I needed to do originally, so there might be more bureaucracy than I remember.  I'm sure there will be more forms for me to fill out in the future too.

Technical parts.

The app is available as a J2ME Java app, a Meego app, and a WRT app.  Nokia has so many different platforms now!  They are adding a couple more platforms too.  Luckily HTMLish apps "work" on all their platforms.

Our Content Management System(CMS) is written in Python/JavaScript/C/SQLite and uses pygame for image processing.  The CMS part is still in development, but is slowly getting there.

We use a form based system to define schemas.  I wrote about this in a "Validation through html forms" blog post, and mainly in "Using a html form as the model".  Basically this allows us to create a html form, and then that's it for the content type.  No need to mess around with schemas, or python models, just create a html form, and that is it.  Since I usually follow a design led approach, the html forms are usually done before anything else.

The data is stored in a mini database system I built which I detailed in the blog post "sqlitepickle SQLite Vs pickle".  It lets you use a dict like interface to save python objects.  It's basically a very simple key value store built on python stdlib modules.

We're using JavaScript on the server side as I detailed in a blog post "server side jQuery" to generate the html.  The nice thing is I can use jQuery plugins on either the client side or server side depending on the need.  Including form validation, and other goodies.  I see it as a replacement for a templating language.

This app as it stands doesn't need much of a CMS, but future apps we have in development require a beast of a system in order to process the vast amount of data - and squeeze it down onto various different formats ready for distribution on multiple channels.



Well it's out there now.  So hopefully it'll help some fellow vintage treasure hunters find some good stuff in Paris.

This is part of a series of blog posts on "my journey getting published on various app stores".