Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

The annual "Festival of Trees" in Atlanta to benefit Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta is underway. This is an even organized to raise awareness and support for the Childrens Healthcare organization and hospital which helps children from around the world. This year we here at TotSP, I mean at IBM (this is an IBM sponsored event that we did volunteer work on) decided to get involved and develop the "Letters to Santa" booth. At "Letters to Santa" kids can stop by (for free) and write a letter to Santa Claus and then print it out. Sounds simple, and it is, but it makes lots of kids very happy.

The development part was a nightmare, even though it should have been cake. Despite many setbacks we got it done and the show is on. Its a complicated story but basically we were told that IBM would not be providing hardware (PCs and printers) and that the deal was off. Then at the last possible minute (right up to the time the show started) we were told that PCs and printers were being provided. So began a crusade to get the app ready in time.

We got 4 new IBM PCs and 2 really serious IBM color printers only days before the show was to begin. We set out to use Linux, with Apache and PHP to build a web based app (because we can handle PHP and MySQL pretty well and we had no money to buy commercial software.) The PCs had a "new" video card that was only supported by the standard VGA server in XFree86, so rather than do the whole thing in 16 colors we begrudgingly abandoned Linux and installed NT (sometimes it happens, uh, we bought those temporary licenses for all this stuff, yeah thats it).

Then we installed IIS and were ready to roll using ASP and ODBC to Access. One problem, who here knows ASP? Even as seemingly simple as it is I am not really familiar with it and I am also not great with ECMAscript (both things I hope to change soon.) Therefore we broke out the books and got started from ground zero. We ended up using NetObjects Fusion to do basic HTML and Cold Fusion (via the NetObjects components) to do database stuff. Again, ColdFusion looks very simple, but I had never used it, so we broke out more books. We ended up with a reasonable web app that uses ODBC and an Access database with a web front end. From start to finish we went through many acronyms and many explitives, but got the job done. Due to time constraints it turned out ultra-simple and with less than ideal graphics, but hey, it works!If you get a chance go by the Festival of Trees to support the hospital and while there check out the IBM-ToTSP Letters to Santa booth. Remember the disclaimer, this is by no means our best stuff, but it made it despite many setbacks. The festival is all this week at the Gerogia World Congress Center, see the festival link for more details.

Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta