Well, the second day of work on the VOIP platform front end has now drawn to a close. The first day was spent familiarising myself with the platform and writing test scripts to make sure that the platform really does work the way it's advertised. A few bugs have shown up here and there, but the author has been extremely good about fixing them immediately, if not instantaneously. I'm very happy with him, he's gone a long way to making me feel comfortable with the project.

Today was the first day of real coding, and I had to reverse a number of decisions I'd made up-front due to the things I learned yesterday. Basically, a few of the marketing assertions turned out to be false, but that actually works to our advantage, as it means that the huge swath of missing functionality can be provided by our VIBES ISP billing system, which reduces the amount of code we need to write by a huge amount.

However, that means that I have to work with D'Arcy or Tim (and with VIBES), which means I can't use Twisted + Nevow (i.e. the tools with which I'm most familiar and comfortable). I wound up falling back to plain-old-CGI for the day's work (VIBES is basically coded as CGI with a number of complex in-house utility libraries with which I'm not familiar enough to work by myself, so when I have access to D'Arcy or Tim we can readily switch it to using those libraries). Plain-old CGI is just plain painful when you've been working with Nevow LivePages and templates. Sigh.

Anyway, long story short, got most of the "setup" story done, and as a side-effect, most of the "user setup" story code is written. Still quite a few stories to go, but it's far enough along that I'm pretty sure we can meet the deadline. Next week I'll have access to D'Arcy, so we can double-team the project and IIUC many of the stories will simply fall out of the VIBES system's existing features.