As expected I ended up working on some more voting projects. It didn’t take too long to build up a simple application to handle what we need it to do. For the most part it is read only, so putting it together was only a matter of putting the right files where they are needed. Building MVC apps in Joonla! 1.5 takes a bit more code, more files and a lot more structuring (view folder, model folder, template folders and a few more depending on what you’re building) than the preferred way in 1.0 but it ends up paying off as the requirements of the project change. Suffice to say the app meets the requirements and will be easily modifiable for when they change again on Monday.

The other aspect was going over the Defect Register with the principal engineer for Crows Nest North and working out the feature differences between it and the Main Roads/RoadTek AMMS application. The main differences appear to be that their system uses chainages to locate road segments (ours just has the streets that they’re between which works well in the city but may not scale well outside of the city) and it can also specify the lane. It also appears to have a primitive synchronisation feature which sounds like it works well on smaller data sets but fails on larger sync’s. So when we’re (hopefully) rebuilding the new system we’ll have to add the simple changes (lanes, chainage and precincts) as well as working out how we build distributed offline editing into the system. Nothing like a challenge!