Projects

These projects are used and pieced together to enable our system to send text messages and maintain all of the users and their reminders.

I Love LAMP!

What, you are using a desk light as your main project? No silly. LAMP is an acronym which stands for Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP (or perl or python, but we are using PHP). These four projects have been combined by the open source community to create one of the most powerful web application servers in use today. Keep in mind, all of these projects are open source and freely available to developers.

Linux

an increasingly growing Operating System based Unix. Linus Torvald developed the kernel which is used in linux, and a set of GNU applications were stacked on top of this kernel to create an OS. The linux distribution which the e-Genda project will run on is Gentoo Linux

Apache

is a very popular web server which can be run on almost any platform you can come up with. It is very flexible and customizable.

Mysql

fast, lightweight database server.

PHP

a scripting language which plugs in very well with apache and mysql to create a very fast web development environment.

Other software:

• Libgmail -- is an Python based API to use gmail to send messages, recieve messages, as well as many other functions. In our prototype we use libgmail to send out reminders.
  • The reasons for doing this are:
    • Use Gmail's sent records as a log of what was sent out.
    • Use Gmail so send messages. This will be less likely to be blocked as spam rather than the message originating at a random ip address.
    • Allows the user to respond(to a message) to an email account which actually exists. This will be a future requirement not valid on this release.
• SAJAX -- is an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible.
• Python -- is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. Python is what drives our multi-threaded Time Management Daemon to deliver the live text-message and email reminders. Python allows rapid and efficient programming.
  • NASA is a big fan of Python and here's what they had to say about it:
    ><br>We chose Python because it provides maximum productivity, code that's clear and easy to maintain, strong and extensive (and growing!) libraries, and excellent capabilities for integration with other applications on any platform. All of these characteristics are essential for building efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems, which is exactly what we need. Python has met or exceeded every requirement we've had," said Steve Waterbury, Software Group Leader, NASA STEP Testbed.