Please note: This application isn't actively developed anymore.
An Open Source Ajax application that allows school classes to manage their homework in a central place, lets the students have discussions and share their photos in a easy-to-use online gallery.
November 5, 2007: Klassenbuch 2.8 released
After about two months of constant development I'm proud to announce the release of the new Klassenbuch version 2.8. This release doesn't introduce a bunch of new features. Most of the improvements were made behind the scenes, invisible to the user. Overall, the speed has been increased noticeable, thanks to both code changes on the server side and on the client side.
New Features
Each window can be closed using the esc key and the arrow keys enable a quick navigation through the photo gallery.
When downloading a whole photo album, a tiny progress window reminds the user to be patient while the server is busy generating the archive. Besides, the server-side archive generation mechanism is a little more intelligent by only generating an archive if really necessary.
A person who uploaded a certain picture (and the adminstrator of course) has the ability to rotate the picture as desired. This feature is still experimental.
The slide show has been improved as well. The navigation elements have been shrinked to icon-only buttons. An additional button in the left upper window corner provides the possibility to leave the slide show. Next, there's a new window that displays detailed information about the current displayed picture and enables the user to save the original-sized pictures directly to the local hard drive, rather than downloading the whole album.
Backstage
On the client side lots of bottlenecks have been removed by reducing DOM operations and tweaking often used core loops. Besides many changes have been made to the server side code. Detaching the JSON specific part from the XML-RPC for PHP library and rewriting it lead to an amazing performance improvement (handling of simple JSONRPC request is up to 5 times faster than before), because it provides only the features really needed. Furthermore, the code size has decreased massively.
Another important step to the final deployment of the application has been made by introducing an easy-to-use installation mechanism, that allows everybody to setup and configure the application on their own web server. The maintainer has the ability to specify database connection information as well as other general information (the name of the class and the administrator's mail address for example).
I'm sorry, there isn't a graphical way to populate the contact table currently. You will have to use a database access tool like phpMyAdmin to add your classmates to the database after a clean installation.
Bug fixes
A bunch of annoying visual glitches have been fixed (affects IE 6 only).
Checking out the source
The Subversion repository resides at http://tools.assembla.com/svn/klassenbuch
Check out the current development trunk with:
svn co http://tools.assembla.com/svn/klassenbuch/trunk
To get the latest stable release (2.8) (It's not as stable as it should be! Check out current trunk instead, thanks):
svn co http://tools.assembla.com/svn/klassenbuch/tags/release_2.8
