Abstract:
The eQuery Project is a codename given to the development of two child projects – Bridge and Outreach. Both these projects take a fresh new approach on some basic of the basic issues in their respective domains. Bridge is the development codename for a communications and message routing system which is designed to be highly modular, and easily extendable messaging layer to bridge the gap between two disjoint systems. The main purpose of developing Bridge as an open system was to encourage wide adoption by anyone who doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel and instead focus their development resources on more important tasks. Outreach started off as a proof-of-concept service to run on top of Bridge, but it spawned a life of its own pretty soon and evolved into a complete system going far beyond the original role that was intended for it. The major aim with Outreach was to develop a mash up between a system to manage a student’s daily tasks and a social network, while making sure that it didn’t create an additional hurdle for the already cumbersome life of a university student. They system had to be universally accessible, modern, robust, easy to use and most importantly, integrate with the daily activities of the users. While the overall development of the project from the initial concept to actual implementation took almost 3 years, the actual development was done only in the past one year. This report chronicles the journey which the design team took by taking a small crude idea and shaping it up into an actual product.
