[Koha] Subject: Contributing- computer reservation?

[Kyle Hall]

> we (BibLibre) are investigating openkiosk
> (http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/)

I've worked with OpenKiosk, and I thought I'd let you know about my
experiences, which was just over a year ago.

First, the Windows client for OpenKiosk is not Open Source. It is
compiled with a closed-source qt to windows api library. Despite the
fact that the Windows client is closed source software, they continue
to host the demo download for it on Sourceforge, which I believe is a
violation of Sourceforge's terms of service.

Second, OpenKiosk is essentially a one man band. At the time I was
first working with it, the developer had decided to stop updating it.
It appears that he is working on it again, but who knows if it will
continue to be an active project.

Third, it just didn't work will. There were a number of major bugs
that made it impossible to use. The primary one being that when the
counter hit 0, instead of logging off, it would give them thousands of
minutes more!

So I gave up on OpenKiosk. The second kiosk system I found was
outkafe, which is a fork of the now dead zybacafe project. It actually
worked correctly. It was written in an uncommon language ( I can't
remember atm ), making changes very difficult, however it works by
having the server and client communicate through a postgresql
database. The first thing I did was rewrite the time counting daemon,
which didn't work well. Second, I wrote a web-based front end to
replace the admin program which wouldn't run well on our thin-clients
for some reason. Then, when I wanted to change the client, I rewrote
that to.

At this point, I had no actual code from outkafe left, so I christened
my trio as libki and put it on sourceforge. I'm still the sole
developer, but I'm always looking for a few good men ; ) The best part
is I've already integrated with Koha, so that part is done!

However, it you decide to work with OpenKiosk, please let us know how
it turns out.

Kyle
http://www.kylehall.info
Information Technology
Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org )




On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:21 AM, paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at biblibre.com> wrote:
> Nicole Engard a écrit :
>> I recently became aware of Pre-Book from Userful:
>> http://userful.com/products/pre-book
>>
>> It's open source and I'm wondering if anyone is using it with Koha?  I
>> haven't seen it in action yet.
>>
> we looked at this tool last week, and pls note that clicking on "free
> download" results in : http://userful.com/sorry :(
>
> also note the technical architecture seems strange : you must install
> the server part on a specific server (or virtual machine) :
> http://support.userful.com/wiki/index.php/Manuals/Pre-Book_Administrator_Guide#Installing_Pre-Book_Server
>

>
>
>
> --
> Paul POULAIN
> http://www.biblibre.com
> Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
> Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
>
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