Re: Helping Debian-Edu
On 27 Jun 2004 11:21:38 -0300, Luiz Carlos Querino Filho
<luizquerino@terra.com.br> wrote:
> Em Sex, 2004-06-25 às 18:28, Tom Hoffman escreveu:
> > Hi Luiz,
> >
> > You should take a look at SchoolTool, at http://schooltool.org We're
> > also working on creating open source administrative software for
> > schools, particularly in the developing world, and with Debian
> > GNU/Linux as the primary development platform. There are a few things
> > that set SchoolTool apart from similar projects:
>
> Hello Tom,
>
> I'll check it. It seems to be really nice, and exactly what I was
> looking for.
> >
> > * it's written in Python using the Zope Object Database;
>
> Couldn't be better! Any specific widget set for GUI? Maybe PyGTK?
The primary client interface right now uses wxWidgets, which acts as a
wrapper for native UI widgets, including GTK on Linux. The current
client interface is probably going to continue to the the primary
interface. We'll be developing an HTML interface for most tasks and
specialized client interfaces for specific tasks, like marking
attendance or grading, for example.
> > * it provides a REST web services API throughout for interoperability
> > with external applications;
> > * the ongoing development is funded by Mark Shuttleworth
> > (http://markshuttleworth.com).
>
> What is the database being used?
It is the Zope Object Database. From the developers point of view, if
your classes subclass the right ZODB classes, they just persist. No
translation between objects and relational database tables is
necessary. You can just focus on object oriented design.
> >
> > We're in a transitional point in development--moving from the basic
> > architecture work to adding components for specific tasks. I'll be
> > writing a bunch of documentation over the next few weeks to explain
> > how the current platform works and how to design new parts. Mark will
> > be funding new development teams, so if you are interested, you might
> > consider combining your efforts with ours and making a proposal
> > yourself.
>
> I'm in! Tell me what are the priority tasks at this time. I am willing
> to help with anything that is necessary.
The trick at the moment is that we've created a unique platform for
creating school administration applications, but we haven't documented
it yet, and there's nothing yet to describe how to build on our
platform. This has made it difficult to expand our developer base
beyond the core team in Lithuania. I'm going to be working hard on
developer documentation this month. In the meantime, just joining the
mailing list and spending some time poking around the application and
sourcecode and giving some feedback on the current code would be
great. Most of the existing docs are here:
http://source.schooltool.org/svn/trunk/schooltool/doc/
Thanks for your interest in SchoolTool!
--Tom Hoffman
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