Re: Plethora of gradebooks

[Bradley Burnside <bradley@voyager.net>]

Hi all!
     Well, on the topic of gradebooks...I should probably say what my plans are.

SQL:    This will be my primary method of storing grades at the school.
Everything can be stored on the same server which makes student records easily
accessible by all teachers and administrators.

PERL:  I know Matt Wimer is doing his in perl...I learned Perl from a book so
I'm not that proficient in Perl, But I do think perl might be the easiest way
for me to submit data to a database.  So I am still researching perl as a fast
way to access the database.  But there is also some nice functions of C that let
me access the database too, so that is still in debate.

GNOME:   The app will be GNOME compliant.  I think GNOME is going to be a major
part of Linux in the future so I am jumping on the bandwagon now before I have
to start writing my app from scratch to make it compliant.  That means you'll
all need the gnome libs to run my app correctly.

XML:  Here is a slight difference between my app and Matt's.  Mine will have a
local save option.   If a teacher wants to take home a class list and add grades
to it they can, so they don't have to be limited to the school to add grades.

C/C++:  I will be writing the majority if not all of it in C,  I haven't written
much in C++ so I won't be using it.

WEB:  I have thought about Web Connectivity, and I am not positive if having
Grades accessible VIA the inernet is safe and if schools are going to look at
that as a plus.  I've seen it done on college campuses but never at a highschool
or lower.  I've been e-mailed by a few people with pluses and minuses of it and
I am still debating whether it will be a part of the app.  As it stands, it will
not be a part of the early releases.

DOCS:  HAHA!!!  Documentation...funny.  I have been in contact with someone who
is willing to write documentation.  So once when I have a release there will be
documentation to follow.

LISCENCE:  It'll be GPLed probably because people in the linux community
wouldn't use it unless it was.  Look at KDE, many people wouldn't use it until
it was GPL'ed.

INSTALL:  The basic tar -xzvf, then ./configure, make, make install.  We've all
done it a million times, you know the routine.

Matt Wimer is also going to be using SQL, so I'm going to contact him..or he is
going to contact me...whatever comes first.  It would bring me great pleasure if
my app and his were cross compatible.  So my app could load his data and his
could load my data.

    Bradley Burnside  -  bradley@voyager.net



Douglas Loss wrote:

> Well, the gradebook idea looks like one whose time has come.  We have three
> separate gradebooks in development, from Justin Maurer, Matt Wimer, and
> Bradley Burnside.  At least two of them (maybe all three) will be
> GNOME-compliant.  Could I ask you three fellows a favor?  Could you talk to
> each other about what you're doing and how you're approaching the task?
> There could easily be good reasons for having numerous different gradebooks
> in the Linux world, but I think you'll find each of your efforts will be the
> better for finding out what others are doing in the field.  And who knows, it
>  may turn out that you'd like to combine efforts and come out with one
> kick-butt app!
>
> --
> Doug Loss            Democracy substitutes election by the
> dloss@csrlink.net    incompetent many for appointment by
> (717) 326-3987       the corrupt few.
>                         George Bernard Shaw