You can jump straight to the app on the Android Market Place by scanning this QR-Code:

Well to answer the latter first, they shouldn’t even need to think about it.

To answer the former, my strategy is as follows:

• I work on a MacBook Pro which is transparently backed up to a TimeCapsule using TimeMachine.  I’ve used this to restore on several occasions, so it’s tried and trusted.  The TimeCapsule itself has only died once and Apple replaced it free of charge.
• Unless specifically requested not to by my customer, I do all my work in a private Dropbox folder.  Dropbox transparently backs up my files to the internet, so if my house burns down or my MacBook Pro and TimeCapsule happen to get trashed at the same time then I can still recover to an emergency computer.
• Finally, source control.  I release early and release often and after every release I push my code to a private Github repository (unless the customer has their own source control).

So all my work is triple backed-up and the whole process is more or less effortless for myself.

Building the application on the second day was also useful for me as it meant I got to test my Taban product.  Taban is a REST / JSON database.  It is schema-less and simply allows any JSON to be thrown at various URLs.  Taban provides a simple querying mechanism which lists resources at URIs and more advanced querying that can return results based on the JSON content at URIs.

This means you can build REST based applications without having to write any server code.  Then when you’re happy with your application you can either replace Taban with a dedicated server process, or because it is OSGi based, extend Taban directly simply by dropping in new OSGi bundles.  Taban also uses db4o, which means you don’t need to create any complicated databases infrastructure – it just works.  Again, because it is OSGi, the database layer is pluggable, so you can easily replace db4o with a RDBMS if you wish.  This allows you to turn your rapidly developed prototype in to a scalable server application very easily.

Taban is free, and available as source from github: http://www.github.com/brindy/taban – I’ll be pushing some changes in to the repository over the next few days; improvements as a result of the training I gave last week.

The OSGi community event was a great opportunity for exchanging information and networking and I’m already looking forward to the next one.  One of the key things for me was that the community decided in real time at the event that it needed somewhere to share technology agnostic examples of OSGi solutions and the conclusion was a WIKI should be established.   Some discussion about this is going on on Alex Blewitt’s blog.

The event also generated a couple of work leads for me, so I am looking forward to following those up.

I’ll be posting news about BrindySoft here, so feel free to follow a long.  Hooking up to my RSS feed is also a good idea!