The Daycos Software Distribution

Note: Right now, this text is identical to the included README file. I wanted to get this online ASAP and this was the quickest way.

Introduction

This is the first public release of The Day Companies software framework, aka "the Daycos distribution". This package was developed solely for internal use, but my boss, Brandon Day, generously agreed to allow me to release it under the terms of the GPL.

Current State

This is definitely a 1.0 release. It's stable - we run our business on it - but I've devoted very little effort to thoroughly documenting the modules or building test cases. In other words, it will probably work equally well for you, but it's never been tested outside of our own production environment. That also means that much of the functionality will be completely useless to anyone but us, or that I've written modules that will seem to strangely overlook obvious usage in favor of more esoteric means. I've tried to make the documentation thorough, current, and accurate, but that has always been a lower priority than robust code.

Contents Overview

The Daycos distribution provides these packages:

Fileretriever

This implements a generic API for fetching objects from remote data storage and presenting it to client applications in a format they can use. The current delegates can retrieve a series of email messages from a POP3 server and render them as text files or TIFF images.

Imageproc

Includes an object-oriented interface to ImageMagick^? functions for converting images between various formats, resizing, and so on. Also present is a barcode reader that can locate and interpret "3 of 9" encodings in image files (given rather tight assumptions about the quality of the input).

MSDatabase

The most well-tested and potentially generally useful package. This consists of a service that can be run on a Windows server, and Unix-ready clients that can communicate with that service via SOAP. Our website uses this to access the enormous FoxPro^? backend that my company runs on. As far as I know, this is the only Free (or even Open Source) project in existence that lets Unix servers query Access of FoxPro^? databases.

I originally wrote the client as a DB-API 2.0-compliant class. However, that resulted in a huge flurry of traffic to and from the SOAP server, so I also added non-DB-API methods to greatly reduce the load (and speed up interactions dramatically).

Also includes a command-line client, similar to other database command- line clients, for manually interacting with remote databases.

Notify

A common API for sending email and Jabber messages.

Pathutils

Common functions for translating between Unix filenames and their Windows equivalents. We use it to interpret filenames that refer to our Windows fileservers in the context of paths to SMB mounts on our Unix servers; this way, every machine on our network can file a given file.

Lightweight wrappers around shell commands for certain file operations (unzipping archives, safely recursively deleting directory trees) and associated functionality (escaping filenames, finding executables).

Methods for generating unique pathnames for temporary files. Similar to tempfile, but with features useful to us.

Speech

Don't get excited. Right now, this only formats times so that they sound good when piped into Festival. We host internal Icecast audio streams and I had toyed with the idea of inserting time and weather information into them at regular intervals. This is the sum total of my progress to those ends.

Configuration

All configuration options are in 'daycos.conf' (see Daycos/daycos.conf-dist for examples). Edit this and store it in one of the usual places (see Daycos/Configuration.py for the exact search list).

Bugs

None that I'm aware of. That is, every module fits very well into the environment it was born to. I tried to make as few assumptions as possible, but I'm sure someone (maybe even you!) will point out very obvious things I've missed.

Future

This software changes constantly in response to our changing business needs. As I'm not in upper management, I have a rather narrow view of what those demands may be. I strongly expect, though, a high degree of backward compatibility and continued support.

-- KirkStrauser - 28 Jan 2005

• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = KirkStrauser