Re: [seul-edu] It's quiet--_too_ quiet.

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Thu, Oct 14, 1999 at 03:25:32PM -0400, Doug Loss wrote:
> I hope the recent lack of messages on this mailing list means that
> we're all so busy with our various educational projects for Linux that
> we don't have time to post messages.  Somehow, I doubt that that's the
> case.

That is the case for me :-)  I just finished version 1 of BEL (a school 
library management system) which has replaced a commercial non-Y2K program.
It does circulation,overdues listings,returns,renewals,add/remove/modify
book cards, and prints barcodes for clients and books.  It is in use with a
12,000 book library, 200 clients (students and teachers). I wrote it with a
single PHP3 script that is 30k big!  The data itself is stored in postgresql
and is approx 2 Megs.

I eclipsed myself from this list to write this program which had to be
running back in early september...  Anyways, the data format is an exact one
to one match with the previous commercial version (I had a devil of a time
converting the proprietary formatted data from the old commercial program
into BEL).  Because I've had to go back and forth for 2 month between the
two databases, and because I discovered half-way through that the XML tools
I use can't handle large files without a very significant time delay, I
turned to SQL (postgresql) for data storage and retrieval. This turned out
to be a "very good thing" (TM)!  I was able to deliver thanks to postgresql.  

Now that i have come up for air, if I had to start over, (and I might), I
would do it in zope instead of PHP.  While I still think PHP is fantastic,
I suspect that Zope is even better. I began using zope to teach information
technology 11 and 12 this september and found it to be a very efficient platform for 
collaborative work.  I find it easy to find my way around the objects of the
zope web environment compared the old fashioned reading through my
monolithic programs in Perl and PHP.  

Zope