Lotus Knows what happens when Domino and flying collide.
Category Reservation Systems
As anyone that reads this blog probably knows by now, I enjoy my hobby of flying, and that I also own a plane. One of the things where my fellow owners are a little in the dark ages is the reservation system. Currently it's a paper based system, sitting at the airport, which imposes a number of limitations.
* You can't check reservations outside of regular airport hours
* You either have to visit the airfield or call someone to check on the status, make a booking etc.
* You don't get notified if someone cancels or changes a reservation
Basically things we just kind of expect to be considered the norm in 2010. This got me to thinking, what kind of reservation options are out there, I took a look at Aircraft Clubs which is supposed to be a very popular system, not to be rude, but it looks a lot like the default Domino web view, which lets face it are ugly, and check this out, people pay to use website! I looked a bit more, and none of the other options out there grabbed me either. Google calendar everyone said, and I took a look, but Google Calendar didn't provide the kind of control where I could stop one pilot deleting another pilots reservation, and it was also cumbersome to make it unable to take double bookings, besides,haven't you heard Google is evil (ooh I think I just heard the sound of this blog no longer being indexed). So then I decided, well what if I make my own, Notes/Domino have calendar views, it can't be that hard. Well that is what I thought, but have you seen the Domino calendar views? These things haven't been touched on the web since they first came out I think, iNotes has a nice calendar, did IBM componentize it so that other developers could use it? Did they hell. Basically if you want a Domino web calendar with drag and drop creation, changes, etc. you're in for some hard work.
After playing with Domino for a while I put the project on a back burner and decided to come back to it when I had a few spare hours. That was this weekend, when I decided to look for web based calendar components, surely someone has built a nice AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript web UI, well after a great deal of Google searches, looking at various components, I finally came across dhtmlxscheduler. This thing is a piece of beauty, it's small, it's fast (well if you run any browser but IE), it renders on the iPhone and it has a really simple JavaScript API, best of all it's got an GPL Open
Basically in the space of an hour I had the thing writing and reading the calendar from a Domino database, then obviously I had to work on things like not allowing double booking etc. That was a few more hours this week.
I still have a few more things I want to do, but I don't think they'll take me very long. Things to add:
* Allow people to setup auto-notification if a booking is changed or cancelled
* Place on a page of the Yellowbird website
* Hook it into Twilio for checking the schedule, making reservations and changing reservations. Also sending out SMS notifications.
* Clean up my ugly code to make it an OpenNTF project. It may end up getting posted as ugly code.
For anyone that is interested, I made this video of how it currently looks, with different people accessing it, how it handles double booking, not authorized to change reservations etc.
As anyone that reads this blog probably knows by now, I enjoy my hobby of flying, and that I also own a plane. One of the things where my fellow owners are a little in the dark ages is the reservation system. Currently it's a paper based system, sitting at the airport, which imposes a number of limitations.
* You can't check reservations outside of regular airport hours
* You either have to visit the airfield or call someone to check on the status, make a booking etc.
* You don't get notified if someone cancels or changes a reservation
Basically things we just kind of expect to be considered the norm in 2010. This got me to thinking, what kind of reservation options are out there, I took a look at Aircraft Clubs which is supposed to be a very popular system, not to be rude, but it looks a lot like the default Domino web view, which lets face it are ugly, and check this out, people pay to use website! I looked a bit more, and none of the other options out there grabbed me either. Google calendar everyone said, and I took a look, but Google Calendar didn't provide the kind of control where I could stop one pilot deleting another pilots reservation, and it was also cumbersome to make it unable to take double bookings, besides,haven't you heard Google is evil (ooh I think I just heard the sound of this blog no longer being indexed). So then I decided, well what if I make my own, Notes/Domino have calendar views, it can't be that hard. Well that is what I thought, but have you seen the Domino calendar views? These things haven't been touched on the web since they first came out I think, iNotes has a nice calendar, did IBM componentize it so that other developers could use it? Did they hell. Basically if you want a Domino web calendar with drag and drop creation, changes, etc. you're in for some hard work.
After playing with Domino for a while I put the project on a back burner and decided to come back to it when I had a few spare hours. That was this weekend, when I decided to look for web based calendar components, surely someone has built a nice AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript web UI, well after a great deal of Google searches, looking at various components, I finally came across dhtmlxscheduler. This thing is a piece of beauty, it's small, it's fast (well if you run any browser but IE), it renders on the iPhone and it has a really simple JavaScript API, best of all it's got an GPL Open
Basically in the space of an hour I had the thing writing and reading the calendar from a Domino database, then obviously I had to work on things like not allowing double booking etc. That was a few more hours this week.
I still have a few more things I want to do, but I don't think they'll take me very long. Things to add:
* Allow people to setup auto-notification if a booking is changed or cancelled
* Place on a page of the Yellowbird website
* Hook it into Twilio for checking the schedule, making reservations and changing reservations. Also sending out SMS notifications.
* Clean up my ugly code to make it an OpenNTF project. It may end up getting posted as ugly code.
For anyone that is interested, I made this video of how it currently looks, with different people accessing it, how it handles double booking, not authorized to change reservations etc.
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Comments
Posted by Alan Lepofsky At 10:23:50 AM On 03/12/2010 | - Website - |
Neil
Posted by Neil Agate At 02:57:37 PM On 03/13/2010 | - Website - |
thanks,
Howard
Posted by Howard At 11:03:45 AM On 03/25/2010 | - Website - |
Please flip me an email if you would be prepared to send me the code...
Posted by Neil Gower At 04:36:12 PM On 10/04/2010 | - Website - |