I started working on Spincloud back in 2003 when I got interested in regular expressions. I liked them so much I started looking for large sets of freely available data that I could crunch. Weather data was quite appealing; not only I’d parse it but I could get instant feedback by just looking at the parsed data, after all we understand temperatures and wind speeds and the like. I’d get to use other technologies I couldn’t experiment at work where I was doing the regular J2EE stuff and I kept feeling the itch to do new things.

And so Spincloud was born; it’s mission: to track the weather worldwide. It didn’t have a name back then but as things started to shape-up, I realized that the experiment was slowly turning into a real project. Then Google published its Maps API and I just knew that my small little pet project just found the perfect playground. It’s been a while since I started with this and I had no intention of publishing it initially. It has grown beyond its initial purpose and I feel it’s time to set it free.

This is the third version of Spincloud, the first two iterations were not publicly released. This is not an open source project; however, I’m planning on blogging about the technical challenges I’m encountering and are interesting enough to share.

Here are the main features of Spincloud:

Update: googlemapsmania.com just ran a story about Spincloud here. Thanks guys!