The CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) Code-Fest  was the hacker’s day of the week ( Everybody was plugged in, with coffee beside every laptop 😀 )
CAP is a XML based data format which is used to send warnings, alerts and other important data during emergencies. This allows the disaster and risk management tools and other tools used during emergencies to collect and interpret data from various different sources. For more on CAP see Wikipedia : CAP and CAP Cookbook

First we had an introduction to CAP protocol for everyone. We also came to know some amazing facts, like during an emergency, ads on a many websites change to alerts and CAP plays a key role in this. I hope other major portals adopt to this strategy soon.

We also had some students from colleges in Colombo who were very excited for learning and contributing to Sahana Eden. Fran and Dominic, the key developers of Sahana Eden had created a CAP template for this event. The amazing thing was they prepared it in nearly 4 hours and it had all the features required. This shows the low-development-time-quick-deployment feature of Sahana which is important for emergency situations.

After a interactive introductory session on CAP we had the green signal of “Let the hacking begin…” 😀 and off we went developing new features for the CAP Template. After few hours of struggling with some errors, I developed a feature where the color of markers on the map change depending on the priority of that marked situation.

After an exciting day full of hacking, coding, coffee, errors, tickets\ we headed off to check out beach and restaurants of Mount Lavinia, a mile long golden beach named after the lover of Governor of Ceylon of 18th Century and also known to have treasure hidden somewhere 😉

Thank you to the Sahana Software Foundation and Google for supporting me to attended the Sri Lanka IOTX Sahana Events in the beautiful capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo.