Web App: Juvely

Revision is really boring, and I can’t wait for the exams to be over! As such I have been doing a bit of work on Juvely on and off when I get a chance. I have been working on the user side of things, and I remember we haven’t given you a walkthrough on that yet so I thought I would start off. The basic stuff for viewing and creating tickets is nearly done, but the knowledge base stuff hasn’t been started yet.

The user side is where people who are having problems go. Here is an example below (we probably should note that even though we are using ‘Google’ they are not associated with us or Juvely in any way):

We have gone for a white-box model and will probably keep it this way for all plans (even free ones), other than T&C and copyright notices. The text on the left of the login box are links to various sections. Once you are logged in above the search box we show a list of your tickets and links to other sections:

Next is the submit a ticket page (hmm the title is wrong). The three boxes are for the user to select a priority of the ticket, you can click on the whole box rather than just the radio button to select it. Next to that is the severity slider, this allows a user to select how severe their ticket is. At the moment we haven’t decided on the names of different severities. Under this you can post your ticket and upload files.

Next up you is the ticket view page. At the top is the title of the ticket, on the left is the priority nice and easy to view. Under this are certain details for the ticket. This can be hidden by clicking the hide button (and will stay hidden for the rest of the session) if it gets in the way. Under this is the user’s original message and any attached files.

Under this is the reply and attachment form, and then replies in the same format as in the staff center. Staff replies are shown in yellow and user replies are shown in green.

If you have been following the development you will probably notice that the design for this is completely different to the staff section. James designed this completely from scratch to be as simple as possible, and I guess what he learned while doing the other sections has been put into this. I shall leave it up to him to explain his reasons and what we are going to do about it!

There is only one problem with being a student: unless you do a fake subject like drama you have exams and that means revision. Fortunately they are near enough here so that means no more boring revision!

James finishes for summer on June 7th, but my exams don’t start till then! My last exam is on June 15th, so hopefully work can start after then! Over Easter the amount of stuff we got done was amazing so we set ourself a target to release the beta by May 15th. That started to creap up on us, so we set a new date for June 15th, but we have no chance of releasing it by then!

I have decided on a final date for us to release a beta, and if we haven’t got anything by then I am quitting! (lol) The date is September 15th which according to Basecamp is 114 days away. So that should mean at least 90 days that I should be able to work on this, if we can work as well as we did over Easter it should be a breeze!

Anyway, watch this space to see what happens!

What? No posts for two and a half weeks, what is going on? Well unfortunately James and I have both had quite a bit of uni work to do. James has got his exams in a couple of weeks and then finishes at the beginning of June. I have had a couple of group projects, but I haven’t got my exams for four weeks so I should be able to get a bit more work done over that time.

Unfortunately I am going to have to send my MacBook back as I am having a few problems with it, this means I am going to be stuck on Windows until the repair has finished so I was wondering what to do for development. On my Mac I have Apache, PHP and MySQL. There are plenty of tutorials, and even packages that do this for you for Windows but I wanted something a tad different so in this howto I am going to explain how to install Lighttpd, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

What you will need
Lighttpd Windows binaries (1.4.15)
PHP (5.2.2)
MySQL (4.1.22)

It is probably a good idea to use whatever version of PHP you are using on your production server, most hosting companies will be using 5.1 rather than 5.2 as linked to above.

Installation
This is nice and easy, just run the installers. The order shouldn’t make any difference but I did it this way: Lighttpd, PHP, MySQL. When installing Lighttpd your virus checker will probably say there is a virus in process.exe, if you have problems it is probably best to close your virus scanner while installing. Information on process.exe can be found here. When installing MySQL it will ask you to create an account, you shouldn’t need it so just click Skip Sign-Up. When configuring you will want to set the type as Multifunctional or Transactional. During the PHP configuration it will ask you for a server type, select Other CGI and from the list of extensions select MySQL.

Configuration
First you need to get lighttpd working, after the installation it wouldn’t work for me without a little change. Go to C:\lighttpd\etc\ and make a copy of the file lighttpd.conf.orig called lighttpd.conf. After this you should be able to run the start script, and if you navigate to http://127.0.0.1/ you should be greated with the startup page!

Next you need to configure PHP to work. This is again nice and easy. You need to edit C:\lighttpd\etc\lighttpd.conf. First find the line with “mod_cgi” on it and uncomment it by removing the #. The add the following to the bottom of the file:

cgi.assign = ("php" => "C:\\Program Files\\PHP\\php-cgi.exe" )

You may need to change it if you installed PHP to a different location, but make sure you point it to php-cgi.exe not php.exe!

Testing

We can kill two birds with one stone by getting a list of MySQL databases from a PHP script! To do so put the following in C:\lighttpd\htdocs\test.php:

< ?php
$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
$db_list = mysql_list_dbs($link);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($db_list))
{
     echo $row->Database . “\n”;
}
?>

(Argg WP sucks for code… “n” should have a backslash before it)

And then go to http://127.0.0.1/test.php, and if you have got it all working you should get a list of the databases!