[Ctm-devel] Fwd: other projects similar to ctm

[Bryan M. <bmu...@gm...>]

Second try to send this message.  Apparently sourceforge lost it...

Replying to my own post again, I've taken a quick look at all three
Open Source ones, sort of.  Two of them, scoutTrak and scout_tracker
are php/mysql apps.  They are pretty simple and straightforward and
pretty rough around the edges.  Might be something I could learn from
them, but probably nothing new or exciting for Mike there.

The last one, EasyScout, is interesting.  It was written by a BYU
professor of Information Systems.  Apparently he had it running on a
public server that any scout troop could get an account on and track
their troop there.  Kind of like what we are thinking of eventually
doing.  I don't know if he charged or not, or why he quit, but his
code is GPL and some other scoutmaster in Colorado still has it
available to download.

The other thing is it's all Java servlets.  I know nothing about
these, other than, I can't run it on my apache/php setup.  I spent a
lot of time (probably 8 hours total) getting Tomcat set up, figuring
out how to compile EasyScout, and then how to run it, and I've finally
gotten to a point where I can log in (and this was kinda fun actually,
up to this point).  Now it consistently gives me the dreaded
nullPointerException whenever I try and do anything.  I've emailed the
dude in Colorado to see if he can help me out, but haven't had a
chance to try his latest suggestions.  The basic problem seems to be
the EasyScout java code being a couple years old and no longer
supported by the latest jdk and/or Tomcat.

Anyway, I guess my final conclusion is, there is still a great
opportunity for us to contribute in this area.  Who knows, maybe the
guys that worked on these other projects would be able to help us out.
 Oh, and the java solution is way, way too complicated to set up and
maintain.  I'm glad we all like php :-)

Bryan