Inhouse-Web

For almost 2 years now I am developing a time recording and management application within our company. It is based upon Turbogears and has been productive since January, 2008. As the demands grew during all these years, the applications got more complex and the sourcecode even more vast. I never had the time to do some refactoring work or even recode the application. During my working time I had the chance to collect some experiences with Django and was really surprised. In contrast to Turbogears, Django has an extensive documentation and joins all parts of a web framework into one. That makes the development process and solving problem during this phase very comfortable.

So besides our companies web application (which isn’t published anywhere) I started a second project called Inhouse-Web, based upon Django. This project is a completely rewrite of the original Turbogears application. My intention was to collect all reusable ideas behind the project, to offer an open source and easy extentable application used for companies to track their employees working time. My most important intentions in rewriting this application were:

• A slim and lightweight design, easy to use in a daily web application
• Small and easy to understand controller functions as the application’s “business logic”
• Plugins for the transfer of ticket information between the time tracking software and ticket systems like Trac
• Few but helpfull jQuery features to ease the daily time tracking effort

As I already have written a small code base I can say, that working with Django is joy and that this framework will help me a lot to quickly rewrite the application with all it’s features we used to like within our company.

To get a sneak at Inhouse-Web, you can checkout the current trunk source via Mercurial:

hg clone http://inhouse-web.googlecode.com/hg/ inhouse-web

Screenshots, some installation instructions and feature listing ca be also found at the Google code project page:

http://inhouse-web.googlecode.com

The project is far away from being completed. But to reduce the development process I will try to make the first release as simple as possible. Additional features can be implemented later. Of course I also need some help with the translation process. More information will follow on this one.

Back to life

Finally created a personal blog again, thanks to wordpress.com blog hosting. The last one was hosted on a commercial provider and I didn’t find the time to post something, or at least something useful. But as the service is free, a new blog wouldn’t hurt. So what about the content of this blog, one of billion other blogs on the net. Mostly I will write about new music I discovered or movies I recently watched, but mainly about my passion to programming, in special to Python. Whether it’ll be small code snippets I found on the net or wrote by myself or about projects I am currently working at.