'Start' (the original name of this project) was the brainchild of legendary Michael Strahan, a former Deputy Principal (and computer guy) of Wiley Park Public School, known herein as WPPS for short. Michael employed me as a casual technician to assist in maintaining WPPS's fragile computer network - I'd show up two or three times a week, replace keyboards, manage users using Novell ConsoleOne and generally harass staff that insisted on installing filesharing applications. I also performed light-duty ethernet cabling work (which I loved)
After a few months of mind-numbingly straightforward maintenance, I began writing some small tools in Visual Basic / VBScript / Javascript in attempt to make my life at work a little more interesting. Evidently, Michael didn't fail to notice, and I was soon writing other low-level tools to mass create folders for each stage/class/student, create automated bootdisks for Nortons GHOST (with different drivers for each computer family), and so on. Intmax was the next major software application written for WPPS, by request
Fast-forwarding a few weeks, Michael decided to put my programming skills to use, and "STaRT", the Student Tracking and Reporting Tool was born. After several meetings, a total of Three public schools joined forces to create a unified reporting program to end them all (with myself as the sole programmer, of course!) - Michael Strahan of WPPS was in the lead, Jeniffer Eggins, Principal of Banksia Road Public School followed, and finally John Warren, the pleasant Principal of Berala Public School also took part.
In a nutshell, Start was a web-based application used to keep track of Student Behaviour, Absences, Skills and more. The ultimate goal was to make it as intuitive as possible, cross-platform and most importantly, it needed to interface with the existing oh-so-ancient DOS-based Oasis software (Absences and Student info were to be exported from Oasis and imported into Start). It was meant to give staff an all-in-one tool to access vital student information, behaviour and attendance data - such programs existed at the time, but were severely bloated and contained unwanted features.
As time progressed, more and more features were added to Start - including the ability to group students by whatever criteria necessary (ie: Behvaiour, Nationality, Age, etc - treading on dangerous grounds!) - By the end of the first year of part-time development, Start was completely re-written from the ground up, making it XHTML and CSS compliant - unfortunately it still wasn't ready for active duty, as the reporting engine was still being decided upon.
Michael Strahan announced his planned migration from Wiley Park to Narellan Public School the following month (closer to home / family). While the project did survive afterwards, it sufferred greatly after executive staff pushed for its early completion (while requesting more features!) - I managed to get less and less sleep each day as I spent most of the night coding the new reporting engine, eventually, I burnt myself out, and somehow managed to submit a borderline-working package to the staff the following day.
While it appeared to work perfectly, the staff were in a noticable panic, as they were forced to migrate to reporting software they've never been trained on nor seen before. In my oppinion, deploying it was a HUGE mistake, but unfortunately it wasn't my call to make.
Report generation used an engine written in Flash Actionscript (due to time constraints, I chose this method to create vector graphics) - All data was POSTed via HTTP to the flash application itself, it generates the report within a couple of seconds, and it's ready to print. Due to a corrupt MySQL installation, each student report took 30-45 seconds to generate on the day of printing! On closer inspection it was due to a corrupt MySQL table, and was promptly resolved the following week.
The project survived the trial by fire, and improvements / corrections were made to any issues that arose. Unfortunately, the Department of Education and Training decided to pull the plug on ALL customised reporting solutions in order to push their own. As a result, many freelance programmers such as myself were out of work - and all public schools that purchased similar solutions from other providors were forced to discard, re-train and start over. Very unfair.
While there were sparks of interest still flying over this software, it was finally laid to rest Mid-2006. While I didn't have the greatest of times developing this software, I still feel a little remorse over it being discarded. I did however acquire great skills in PHP and Javascript - in fact, I didn't know a single iota of flash nor actionscript a few months prior!
