In early March 2011 I attended a Startup Weekend event in Cambridge. Over the course of the intensive 54 hour weekend, I created the backend for a project called BelongingsFinder. The project aims to help victims of the tsunami and earthquakes in Japan recover their lost belongings. BelongingsFinder won the best social enterprise award at the end of the event and has since attracted international news coverage. The project is ongoing and the team is currently researching ways in which we can provide our technology to the relevant organisations in Japan.

Technology

The project runs on Amazon Web Services, making use of EC2, ELB, S3 and EBS. A number of tools and frameworks were used, such as:

• Restlet Java REST framework
• Hibernate ORM
• Hibernate Search (Lucene) with multilingual configuration
• Zend Framework

Source code

The code for the backend of BelongingsFinder is available on GitHub