Customer
Catholic Church of Hungary
Task
extending the countrywide used software system managing all the catechists, divinity groups, schools, educational venues with facultative groups, individual user logins, catechists’ progress logs, printable reports and logs.
Time period
2015
Technology
Java platform, Groovy language, Tomcat web server, MySQL database engine.
Hosting of the system is done by the customer.
Framework
Groovy on Grails (that was a heritage of the existing systemam – however I have learned using and started to like it very quickly)
Details
The existing system has been used exclusively by administrators of the dioceses of Hungary for registering all the divinity groups, catechists and venues and generating reports based on this. One of the main requirements of the development was to extend it with the ability to handle catechists’ logins allowing them to manage their own facultative divinity groups and progress logs, providing this way more detailed information for the central administration and alleviating the burden on administrators at the same time. This also required the creation of a simple workflow for both areas governing the control and acceptance process of groups and logs. It was also required that every user in the system should be nominated for personal helper of some other user, having access to everything that the helped person has access to while completing tasks in his or her own name.
Set of data registered has also been extended by a great extent, especially data related to catechists and educational venues. This latter had to be assigned to school districts – that was newly introduces by the law – as well as to parishes and deaneries that was required by the church. Accordingly, large set of reports have to be extended while the need for new reports has also emerged in relation to the catechists.
Greatest challenge of this job was to discover and extend an existing system. Vast amount of time and effort was needed for cleaning up and significantly improve the quality of the software’s source code. This investment, however, provided a high return considering future developments, as maintainability and expandability was greatly improved in this development phase.
The system’s language is exclusively Hungarian, therefore the screenshots presented here are of this language. On the screenshots, sensitive personal data are masked.
