Sonntag, 12. Januar 2014

An Outlook onto pygcstats 0.7

Note upfront: this is a translation of the original, German-language blog post "Ausblick auf pygcstats 0.7"

For last months it was a bit quiet around pygcstats. The last version 0.6.2 dates back to end of May 2013. However, as there is not a single bug report until today, this release seems to work fairly well.

For all of you who do not know pygcstats (yet): in short words, it is a program which can generate all kinds of statistics on your found caches (at geocaching.com). Statistics can be output onto the screen or into a HTML file.
pygcstats is written and maintained by 25% of the GC-Team DerSchnelleLinus.
Although there are no bugs reported, pygcstats is not perfect. Despite the fact that release 0.6.x is considered as "feature complete" by the author, there are some weak points which should be removed for 0.7.


The main issue of pygcstats up to and including version 0.6 is the template system. Although it works as it is supposed to work, it is not language-agnostic. pygcstats ships with a number of English and German-language templates, but no other languages. In theory, it is not problem to write templates in any other language (like e.g. French, Spanish etc.). But to do so, the user would have to dive into the usage of JSON Template, the so far underlying template engine, as the templates do not contain text and placeholders only, but also some template logic like loops and conditions. Which is, for the common user, a pretty big to too big step.

As a consequence of that, the template system for pygcstats 0.7 was completely re-written. Templates are logic-free now, containing text and placeholders only. This makes it very easy to write templates in other languages and customize existing templates to fit your demands.
A nice side-effect of this is that now pygcstats does not need any external libraries like the a.m. JSON Template any more. Only Python 2.7 or 3.x need to be installed on your computer.


Furthermore, the "custom search" functionality was removed from the HTML user-interface of pygcstats. It is now (again) focused on generating statistics. Nevertheless, searching through your found caches can be pretty handy. Thus, this feature will be moved into its own program (probably to be called "pygcbrowse" or so), which hopefully will be released soon.

The output of the statistical data to the Terminal was removed as well. pygcstats now always generates a HTML file, which can easily be opened and viewed in your browser.

In terms of statistical data, there is not too much new stuff in release 0.7. The biggest addition may be that pygcstats now can generate GeoAchivement badges as well, in addition to the existing myGEOtools and Badgegen Badges.

The programming for pygcstats 0.7.0 is done and this version is already ready for download from the project page, for Python 2.7 as well as Python 3.x. But as the update of the documentation as well as the homepage is still under progress, the announcement official release may take another one or two weeks.


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