iWander End-of-Semester Release Notes

July, 2001

The iWander software and data are probably just nearing an alpha-field-test state. It's been a great learning experience, and better yet - FUN!

The following is a list of issues/features that need more work or consideration - but that there just wasn't time for now:

• mod_perl - it would be beneficial to build Apache with the mod_perl module to increase performance

• administrator op's password protected - the administrator functions are very useful for maintaining and debugging iWander data, but it's dangerous to allow deleting and inserting of records. Ideally, the administrator pages and operations should be password protected. A compromise at this time is to have the delete and insert operations only available when running in 'debug mode' since that's when those operations are actually the most useful.

• htdocs/ and htdocs/scripts - to separate and isolate the iWander directories and files from other files in htdocs/ & htdocs/scripts it would be better to package it into it's own directory tree (and setup in httpd.conf appropriately). This separation is cleaner when I deploy the CGI scripts & html files on the MSIE server using the deploy shell script.

• DB consistency checks - setting up and maintaining the iWander data is a bit cumbersome. A tool would be very useful to verify the rules & relationships. Some sort of graphical display might also be nice. Expand one of the homework answers perhaps.

• Photos & their processing - the 'sizing & naming' of image files needs to be automated. A different set of photography and graphical design software and skills would have to be employed to make the application ready for real use. The whole data collection aspect of taking the right pictures, planning the right waypoints ... documenting the regions, start-points, waypoints, views, etc ... is a major undertaking.

• Testing - additional black-box (functional & performance) testing should be performed.