Show HN: whEnroute - a 3 week Haskell time-routing web app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: whEnroute - a 3 week Haskell time-routing web app

test.whenroute.com

14 pointsivanstojic6 comments

About three weeks ago my friend and I enquired if anyone had any work for two hard-core hackers from Eastern Europe (over here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684909). Several of you go in touch with us, and we're just now finishing our first project: a web app that helps you plan optimal routes and ordering for your events - whEnroute.

The client side is a thin smattering of HTML and jQuery. The server side, though... the server side is pure Haskell. We're using the Snap web framework, Heist templating and a couple of open source libraries to talk to Google and SMTP. Some of the changes we had to implement on open source libraries were already merged upstream.

At the heart of this app is an algorithm that solves the time-constrained traveling salesman problem. The solution is two-fold: for smaller data sets, we run exhaustive searches. For larger data sets we do simulated annealing to deliver an acceptable solution.

The whole thing is still being tweaked, options being added, the user interface is a mess, but hey... it works somewhat, and somebody might actually like it. Launch early, eh?

Thanks for helping us find challenging work HN!

Sincerely, Ivan & David

Edit: if anyone has any questions, I'm here, and my e-mail is in my profile!

For some reason, your app crashes my browser. Firefox 4, it stops responding.

Fixed - in the rush to get it out the door, I cross-merged some branches I should not have :-(

Yep, it works now. Looks really good.

I wish all the best to everything made in Croatia.

Small remark: it is not clear what this is about from the front page alone. The about us link at the bottom does a good job explaining it, however. Maybe it should be somehow visible from the start to new visitors.

I agree that your site does not make it clear to the user, as a web developer I know that sometime we are not the best at conveying what we do and just assume others will understand. By that same token I was willing to hand over my calendar access because also know that sometime you have to take a chance for a huge reward, the reward being an awesome service, I would love to try it out however every date on my calendar is gray and I have a lot of events on my calendar so I am a little confused at how to work it

We are already addressing the issue of no demo/intro/explanation to the user. Thanks for your suggestion!

The grayness is a bit strange... if you have a few moments to help me test out why you can't work it, drop me an e-mail.

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