Where Everybody's Crazy

I've spent much of today hacking on Songbee, the song projection software that I'm supposed to have finished around three years ago now. It's in a funny state. It sort of works, although there are a few bits and pieces that need clearing up. But there has been a massive black cloud hanging over it for almost all of those three years.

The black cloud is, of course, Windows. Anything we're going to be deploying on missionary and church PCs needs to be Windows-based, and Windows is not an easy operating system to deal with. For a long time, I simply didn't have a copy. Now I do have access to a Windows machine, and the Windows Perl scene has moved on a lot in those years as well.

But I've still had a few problems getting some of the Perl modules compiled and working, specifically the XML and XSLT processing modules. So, instead of fighting them any longer, I've spent the day getting rid of them. Mozilla has its own XSLT engine with a Javascript interface, so I've converted the code to use that instead. It's simplified the code, too, by doing less in the Perl layer and more in the Javascript. Next I'm going to be turning the XML parsing into regular expressions, which is evil in a general case but fine in this case because I have control over the XML generation anyway.

After that, we should be able to use PAR to produce a working Windows executable. It'll do the basics of song projection, but having a path to creating a working executable means it'll be easier to roll out new releases very quickly and get people using them and testing them. That will be a major hurdle to get over.