Update on Etcetera, screenshots too!
I’m giving a brief presentation on the Django-based system I’m building for Missouri State University’s Educational Technology Center tomorrow, and thus I’ve done a few obligatory slides on what it can do. Here’s a SlideShare viewer for the PDF I’ve saved from my slides.
I’m developing it using Django’s subversion trunk for now, but once 1.2 is released (before too long, I imagine), I’ll lock in the feature set there and use the 1.2 line. All development is done on my local machine, which is setup with virtualenv and pip. I’m currently using TextMate and occasionally MacVim as my text editors. I then use my local machine as an Apache test environment as well, running through a mod_wsgi daemon. All the development code is currently hosted on github, but that may change if the university doesn’t want the code listed publicly. It’s there for convenience, as I can post updates to the application there, and whoever manages the server in the future can just pull the changes. It’s also great for collaboration, as others can view the code and make suggestions (which are surely needed; I’m still in the Django-learning phase).
The production server running it is a Mac OS X Leopard Server-running quad-core Intel Xserve. It uses PostgreSQL 8 in both development and production. Here’s some numbers (my favorite part).
- The system is serving roughly 16 (soon to be about 25) users
- It houses nearly 6000 rows of equipment — everything in ETC’s inventory
- It holds close to 1000 past and present work order tickets for equipment problems across campus
- It will track about 1200 equipment checkout orders per fiscal year from 91 buildings/locations and 324 organizational/business units on campus
- I really need to install Google Analytics code to get usage statistics… once I do, I’ll have those numbers as well
It runs quite nicely in tandem with Nathan Borror’s slick redesign of our department’s website, also written in Django (it uses docutils to parse reStructuredText files into HTML).
