Book Project Update
So unfortunately I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to work on my book library project. What with buying a unit, Christmas, going to NZ and helping test a software app on the side, I just haven’t had the time.
However I had made some progress.
I’ve done some basic work familiarising myself with python. I’ve come to the conclusion that it would have to be one of the best languages I’ve ever worked with. The only way I can describe it is as if C++ and perl reproduced and had a child that took the best features from both languages and none of the worst features. Glee! It is very easy to write nice clean code that makes sense.
I also bought a CueCat for scanning the barcodes. My reasoning was that it was cheap and was likely to have good support on many platforms since there are so many of them around. I’ve since found that it can be little slow to scan barcodes, but is certainly good enough for the moment. I’ve ported some code to decode the CueCat output from javascript to python.
My original plan was to build a GUI for this using wxpython. Since then I’ve discovered that the CueCat doesn’t need complicated drivers, it just dumps encoded output similar to the way a keyboard does. So there is no real need for a heavy client on a desktop, I can just skip to building the whole thing as a web application.
I’ve currently looking at different frameworks, but at the moment django looks pretty sweet.