[skrubly]

Although I've been working with django daily for about the past six months, I used bottle for a small stand-alone 'desktop-like' application.

I needed an easy, quick way to take roll call of a large group of people. We have a laptop with a projector but no internet access where the meeting occurs, so it had to be able to live on a Windows machine without network access. Bottle allowed me to pull together something in about five hours that uses sqlite for local storage of all of the participants names and whether they are present/absent and any notes. Previously, I was doing this on an inherited excel spreadsheet and it was very difficult for anyone else to read their name or any information. Now, it's a very simple HTML page with very large font that can be read from the back of the room.

So, thank you bottle! I was able to develop on Linux and fairly painlessly deploy it to the Windows laptop, and it worked the first time. (That was scary... Rarely happens to me.)

[stuartcw]

I'm curious, how did you justify the return on investment of developing this? In most business situations, "Use Zoom to make the font bigger" would have been the boss reply.

I almost always have to seed Version 1 as a stealth project or weekend project. Version 2 is more likely to be approved once it has been shown useful.

[skrubly]

Ah, I should mention that this is for a volunteer non-profit group. They are/were falling into the 'spreadsheet as a database' trap, so this is the first visible step to move off of that and onto something manageable.

The next stage is to get a slightly more comprehensive site going which will keep track of contact information, attendance history, etc.

[nosignal]

Is this code that you can put online somewhere? This kind of thing would a) likely be really handy for lots of people and b) is the kind of thing I'd like to be able to make myself (using browser as a readymade UI), so having an existing reference would be helpful.

[skrubly]

Thanks for the interest! I've finally sort of figured out how to use github and put it here: http://github.com/skrubly/rollcaller

[nosignal]

Thanks for putting it up. I'll have a play with it!