I wanted to give a real world example for the use of GENNIT. However, to make it a real real world demo I had to wait for that situation to come along. Fortunately the gods have blessed GENNIT as that situation came along a few days ago. This is part 1 so please be patient!

A few years ago, after spending practically 365 continuous days surfing, I found myself back in London. It felt like a million miles away from a decent surf beach. Fortunately, England’s South West is blessed with a varied coast which, in the late summer, isn’t too cold to go surfing… providing there’s waves and its a very long drive (5 hours) to find out if there isn’t any. There’s obviously other surf forecasting software out there, but I wanted my own surf forecast, so I created GlobalSurfari.com.

Skip forward a few years and the Facebook revolution has started, with 30 million users and the ability to write applications for the platform it just seemed like a great place to put Global Surfari, for all the Facebook surfers around the world.

Brief

1. Put GlobalSurfari.com into Facebook
2. Allow users to chat on a ‘wall’ within each individual surf forecast location (Facebook Social Aspect).

Design
Getting the surf prediction to the user is already handled by the Global Surfari system in place. The social aspect did not exist, to provide this functionality I would need to know -

1. Who the user was
2. What Surf Prediction they have as their default
3. What Surf Prediction they were writing the message on
4. The message they were writing (and the time they created it)
5. That’s it.

So after all that, here’s my UML diagram committed to paper.

Jump to Code Generation Real World Part 2