Status Report

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Wyatt Baldwin

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Sep 27, 2006, 7:42:32 PM9/27/06

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In case anyone is curious, what follows is a summary of what I've been
up to in the last month or so. If anyone else has any new developments
to report, please post them as a reply to this message.

About a month ago Mark (Metro DRC) and I identified some areas to
focus on for getting the trip planner ready for "prime time":

- Switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL
- Using PostGIS spatial extensions to PostgreSQL
- Migrating the Web front end from using plain vanilla CGI to a Web Framework
- Unit testing
- User interface testing (esp., bringing in real users)

Not officially on the list, but a prerequisite AND a side effect of
making the above changes, is "refactoring", which is, roughly
speaking, the process of rearranging and rewriting code to make it
"better". I won't try to define "better", but I'll just say that
refactoring is important and necessary (and maybe even fun, if you're
into that sort of thing).

I've been plugging away at the first three items in the list and have
added a few more unit tests to the back end code. I have a version
(0.4) that is *almost* ready to be pushed out to somewhere semi-public
and tested. I hope to "go live" with this new version no later than
the end of October, but hopefully within a couple weeks.

The goals of all these changes are:

- Reducing development effort by using, when appropriate, available
libraries and frameworks instead of "rolling our own"
- Creating a more stable system
- Making maintenance easier by organizing and refactoring the code so
it's easier to read and understand (and adding lots of comments)
- Making it easier to add new features

Future versions of the trip planner will build on these enhancements
to create a more user-friendly application with fun (!), new (!)
features.

Right now I'm at a point where I need to start checking in the new
code, since I seem to be past the point of excessive churn and things
have pretty much resolidified. You can view the current code here:
<http://trac.bycycle.org/tripplanner/browser>.

I think that about covers it. In the coming weeks, I'll post updates
to this and put up a link to the new version when it's ready.