Kevin did a great job presenting SimpleTicket at BarCampDallas. Woot! The source code has been released, now the real work begins - with the community (that hopefully) will be formed around the tool.
What is SimpleTicket? Think simple, easy to use trouble ticket system freely distributed via the GPL license written using Ruby on Rails with Ajaxian goodness.
I just finished going through the workflow with Kevin and I am very excited to say it works. There are a few tweaks required, but it works. We will be able to test in production all week, demo on Saturday (BarCampDallas) and release that night. There are going to be some missing parts:
The tweaks? First, there are a few auto-populate features that are necessary to make the software easy to use. Next, we need to streamline the ‘take ticket’ workflow to remove a step (i.e. deliver you to the update screen immediately). Finally, we need windows to close after an action is taken on them, right now the previews stay open after actions are completed. Anyway, congrats to Kevin - bang up job before the ‘end of the day.’
The final deadline to sign up as a beta tester for SimpleTicket (i.e. and get a free t-shirt) is Friday. Email me if you want to find out more (if you already have, don’t resend). We have folks from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Boston, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, New York and Portland already signed up.
SimpleTicket is one of the sponsors of BarCampDallas. The event will be held on January 28th at our INFOMART location. What is BarCampDallas? Officially BarCamp is, “an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.”
If you are a computer, network, software or technology GEEK in Dallas on January 28th BarCamp is for you. The event will start around lunch (snacks will be provided) and last throughout the evening (dinner will be served). Want to spend the night? Brian has agreed to host a BarCamp sleepover in our data center for the out-of-town folk dead set on a sleepover (don’t unplug anything).
Kevin will be demo’ing SimpleTicket during his presentation. We figure that is the only way we will get him to release the software - i.e. have a hard deadline. We all have our fingers crossed that everyone will like it…
INFOMART
1950 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 2022
Dallas, Texas 75207
214.550.2002 Help Desk
Ok, this came up in discussion last night when we were hanging out at Cafe Gecko after the Refresh Dallas meeting. I like the speed and flexibility of writing against the ActiveRecord system, and inside the MVC model. It makes coding less work than the design, which is certainly new for those of us coming from old-school PHP and Python coding. Take this example:
There are four tables that are used regularly in SimpleTicket:
The tables are all tied like so; Tickets has_many Users, Journals. Customers has_many Users. etc. etc. etc. So when finding the name of a user who owns a certain ticket, I can write:
< %= Ticket.find_by_id(id).user.name %>
However, there is a minor concern with this. That simple statement, while fun to write, generates two SELECT statements against the SQL database. Seems kinda like overkill? It gets worse. There are many different ways that I use this model set to paint the pages shown in the admin utility, and the My Tickets page can churn out some really heavy SELECT statements, in large numbers. So while it is easy to code, how do you control the sheer dearth of queries to make your application behave responsibly? Yes, you can do things like create objects on the fly with find_by_sql and such, but that really takes away the power of the MVC model.
If any of you have any thoughts on this, I would love to hear them.