zane has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to write a web-based program that will allow people to schedule the use of the recording studio we have on our school campus. There will be a list of people who are allowed to sign up on the schedule, and by signing up they block out a chunk of time on the schedule, which other people should be able to see, but not sign up during. Ideally there should be an administrator who can change anything on the schedule.

There should be some fixed amount of look-ahead (say, two months), defining the maximum time in advance anyone can reserve the studio, and archives of who used it when should be kept. Are there any pre-existing Perl modules that would be useful in doing this kind of thing?

It will be running on an Apache web server under Linux, with CGI and SSI enabled, but I will not have root access to the server - i.e. I can't install MySQL or anything like that.

--
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.

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Re: Web Based Scheduling tool in Perl
by foogod (Friar) on Jun 19, 2001 at 10:12 UTC

    I have encountered this problem before, and tackeled it with a number of different solutions. One of which (used coldfusion <-- yuck! and oracle) for a conference room booking system, the others used php and perl with postgres.

    From my experience the examples out there are scarce and poor...but WCAL is a calendar system which may give you some insight into the logic behind this type of project.

    A few tips from the experienced:

      If at all possible use SQL! Whether it be mysql, postgres, oracle, miniSql, or even god forbid SqlServer. Using SQL will speed up you app (probably) and will positivly make the creation process much easier (if you know your basic SQL commands, select, insert, update, and delete)

      For the "duration" portion of the app, use something like: 

      StartTimeStamp        06/19/2001 04:30:00
EndTimeStamp          06/19/2001 06:00:00
Duration(in minutes)  90

      [download]

      and a final tip is for the timestamps use the actual unix timestamp, and then manipulate that with Date::Calcand Date::Manip

    Other than that dive in and go for it ... it truly wont be as bad as you might think.

    HTH

    - foogod
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Re: Web Based Scheduling tool in Perl
by Beatnik (Parson) on Jun 19, 2001 at 10:58 UTC
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