Ruby on Rails to power 13,000 schools with 7million+ students in Kerala, India | Hacker News Reader

Ruby on Rails to power 13,000 schools with 7million+ students in Kerala, India

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I met these guys when I was in Kerala this year, and they're really inspiring.

Here's the direct link to what they're doing: http://www.projectfedena.org/

http://www.projectfedena.org/ layout is broken for me in Chrome/Linux, seems okay in Firefox.

Shouldn't the link be http://www.projectfedena.org/ ?

You had a trailing /s in your link which was probably taking you to the 404 page.

No, just mis-formatting on my part. I didn't manually type the link that was linked in this comment section, I merely middle-clicked, copied it to my comment after seeing the problem, then added a spurious \'s

Their GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/projectfedena/projectfedena_v2.0

However the last commit was a a year back. And almost all code is in one single bulk commit. There should be more visibility into the development process to truly call it an open-source project. Also the code can use some serious love: has fat controllers with logic and close to little or no specs.

Computerizing schools in Kerala is going to be a huge challenge : there is going to be non-trivial resistance to computers from existing school administrations. I hope this does not become vapor-ware and the guys are able to pull it off.

The development is not going in the github repo currently.That's a mistake we will be correcting in a week or two with a new release(no more bulk commits). And yeah , the code can use some serious love.Patches welcome !

Glad to hear that the project is moving to Github. Hopefully you'll see a lot of commits from the OSS community.

So the team from Foradian will also be committing to the same github repo or will there be a parallel subversion repo within Foradian?

and tests, I don't think I saw any there...

That would be a challenge, wouldn't it? Without tests, a lot of people would hesitate to contribute, and with a small group of developers it would take some time to add tests to a somewhat large project like this.

Any plans from Foradian on this front?

Yes, we have new plans for testing Fedena. We are continuing with the shoulda tests which you have written! :)

I do know that the project is being developed actively, although I believe the team has continued using subversion internally rather than move the project to github. Only the major versions are being pushed to github and the daily commits go to the subversion repo.

As for the fat controllers, I have to take the blame for that myself. A lot of the awful code was written by me over two years ago when I had close to zero programming experience. I am no longer working at Foradian (the team that developed Fedena), and haven't been able to undo the damage I left behind. :)

I do hope that the project will eventually move to github so that the OSS community (and former developers of the project like myself) could help improve the code. Would love to hear what the folks currently working on the project think of the idea.

Hey nithin :) We are thinking of keeping two branches in github - a stable one (for people to download and use ) , another development branch - to which we will be accepting all the patches , including the changes here from foradian. Planning to set this thing up in a week or two.

See your patches soon :) , Good day.

Ah, that's good to hear. Funny that you answered this question while I was typing it over here. :D

I think GitHub also supports Subversion by now, maybe they missed that?

i am quite curious why they chose to build their own rather than use an existing one like schooltool http://schooltool.org/

Looking forward to download the latest code from github and do some work and which I thought would add some highlight to the application, when I was associated with Foradian and being a Fedena developer.

Also this will be a comeback for myself to Rails world after an year and make some improvements on my own code that I have written for Fedena an year back and submit patches. Playing around with fedena will surely be giving me lots of confidence to get back to Rails community.

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