pombredanne / lizard-blockbox

Rewrite of PKB "Blokkendoos", a VB application, to web

lizard-blockbox

Introduction

Blockbox translates to 'Blokkendoos' in Dutch. Blokkendoos is the name of a Windows (VB) application written by one of our clients.

What does it do? (short version)

In The Netherlands, we have some large rivers such as the Maas and the IJssel. A bunch of measures can be taken to alter (improve) their characteristics. Blokkendoos presents a list of measures which the user can apply on a river to see the effect they will have in a graph and on a map.

Rewriting

They asked Nelen & Schuurmans to 'port' this traditional desktop app to the web.

Porting, in this case, involves a lot more than you'd think:

• Transition from desktop to client-server architecture.
• An HTML interface, with IE7 compatibility as a must-have.
• Keeping 'state' in a stateless environment (HTTP).
• Data untangling.

At the same time, the map had to be added to the mix (it wasn't built into the original VB app)

Technologies used

• Django / Lizard as the base of the app
• Backbone.js to structure the clientside coffeescript
• Coffeescript to produce more readable code
• OpenLayers, jQuery, Flot (for the graph)
• FxCanvas for making Flot perform reasonably (instead of excanvas)
• X-Accel for serving factsheets

Issues

Issues for the Blockbox specifically are gathered at Github and are managed through Huboard:

http://huboard.com/lizardsystem/lizard-blockbox/board