Software

This list gives you a brief overview of the different projects I've been involved in, as well as the technologies I've worked with and I'm familiar with.

Since my current scholarship forbids me any additional job, this list is not going to evolve much until 2011, except maybe for some university-related projects.

Automate - Automating student evaluation

Work of 2008. Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur in collaboration with Hubert Toussaint and Isabelle Linden

Evaluating programs written by students is a repetitive and time-consuming task. Too often, this evaluation is done once the development is finished, leaving the students no time to change and enhance their program. Automate was developed in an effort to solve this problem. Automate manages student assignments, allows students to submit answers and automatically tests them for correctness. This has several key advantages: students now get immediate feedback on their work, it relieves the supervisor from manually testing each answer (allowing to break up an assignment into small steps, that can each be tested) and it provides the supervisor with a clear overview of the progress of each student.

This development is actually a re-development of an internal tool that could no longer be maintained. The (french) name was kept for historical reasons. Technically, Automate has a three tier architecture. The front-end is provided by a webinterface written in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework; the middle tier is a threaded Java server that does the actual processing of submissons, and the back-end is provided by a MySQL database. Based on an older design that never made it into production, I designed the architecture and did all of the PHP and Java development.

The tool will see its first use in the first semester of 2009. Even after that, the project will continue to evolve and we are planning on realeasing it under an open source license.

Sawmill purchase calculation system

Work of 2007. Intec Software Engineering

This custom developed system is used for the calculation and management of purchases at public auctions for the purchase department of a large sawmill. Its main usage is the calculation of price estimates for wood lots that are announced for public auctions, as well as the tracing of items that were part of a lot and what became of them (including analysis of benefit). The tricky but fun stuff during the implementation of the tool were its Excel-like calculation features, where one change would trigger several other changes, which also trigger changes and so on.. on the same window.

The project was all done in VB6 with custom OCX controls (the default environment of Intec at that time) and MS SQL Server as back-end.

e-Curator Content Management System

Work of 2006. For my own use, as well for Ficos Information Technologies.

e-Curator is a Content Management System written in PHP. The key point of e-Curator is it's ability to be adaptable to every environment. Basically, e-Curator is a data management system that is set upon a database, which contains the contents that are displayed on the web page.
The idea behind e-Curator is the following: almost every web page that has to be administered easily, relies on a database back-end, and every page has its own structure depending on what the page is about. The database structure of a page from a theatre will be different from the one of an automobile club, and this is the case for almost every subject. That's where e-Curator comes in, because as a data management system it can be set upon every database without lots of preconditions. With it's features it then becomes a real content management system.
Still, one could ask: What about the hundreds and thousands of open-source ready-to-go CM systems on the net? In fact those systems are all handling some standard situations. The problem with these is first: the standard situation is not what the customer wants, he'll have his own ideas and requirements. The second is: once we come to more elaborate situations, like for instance the situation of a theatre, where plays/seasons/actors/dates/genres/... have to be managed; we have no standard situation anymore, and something custom needs to be done. The benefit of e-Curator is thus it's flexibility, because it's made for any situation, and setting up an e-Curator installation won't take more than 4 hours. This allows the creator of a web page to spend all his energy on creating a good page, without loosing the benefits of employing his own database scheme. He won't have to bother about back-end management, he can focus entirely on the front-end, which is the clearly the point where success or failure are decided.
In fact, e-Curator is my favourite project, it started around 2002, based on a custom build CM system for one of the first PHP/MySQL pages I created.

EDI connectivity for Trade-In

Work of 2006. At Intec Software Engineering

My task was to implement general EDI capabilities for invoices and orders on Trade-In, which is a goods trade and management application of Intec Software Engineering. The implementation relied heavily on stored procedures which were developed for MS SQL Server. This was an interesting project as I gained much experience on how to use and how to implement stored procedures. Additionally, I came into touch with the EDI technique, I learned how things work in this domain and what it means to adapt an in-house system in order to support EDI.

Intec Software Engineering's Pay-In

Work of 2005. At Intec Software Engineering

Pay-In is a payroll accounting software adapted to the legislation of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. My task was to develop as much of the application as I could, the tool was then maintained by a collegue. The program was written in VB 6 with a MS SQL Server as back-end database. It was a great experience to take part in this project; in fact for the first time I had to work in a highly professional environment (concerning standards and conventions).

Control software for an industrial plotting robot

Work of 2005. At Alphabeton GmbH

Alphabeton is a factory producing precast concrete elements like precast ceilings, walls and so on. All elements lie on big steel tables during production. The first step in the production cycle is to draw the element's outline on the table, a task that is done by a plotter. The device has an x-axis of 14 meters, a y-axis of 3 meters, a z-axis of 2 meters and a 360 degrees rotation axis, quite a huge thing. My task was to update the old PLC-based software to a more flexible Windows based control software, using a PROFIBUS architechture along with Wonderware's InControl automation software. This was quite funny and very instructive since I never had done something similar before.