I released the two services for PI to get documentation of mappings and to compare two mappings to see what have changed. The release to those services can be found in the The easy PI message mapping documentation service PI mapping diff tool.
After the release people have been asked if it was possible to run the tools at the users own computer instead of the server version. And I have been thinking about releasing the scripts as commercial products to accommodate this request. It is possible to create compiled PHP code, which can be executed at local PC’s. I did decide against it because it would require a product to be more mature then the product is and did not believe the marked was large enough and marketing would be difficult. By releasing the product as open source it might be possible to get other to contribute and create a service, which could help many more.
The product was original designed to run on a server in a controlled environment. But with this version I had to refactor some of the code to support the usage a client perspective. A problem is that script is extracting a lot of files from the XIM files. These files need to be cleaned up and I used the quick solution to use the windows Delete command to do this clean up. There are some other places which have not been cleaned up yet, they will be cleaned up in the next release.
One of the challenges with releasing software as open source is that it exposes ones coding capabilities. I would say that there is a long way to go before I’m able to get a living from coding PHP. The code seems to work, but the refactoring is a little more time consuming.
You can find the code and installation guides at code.google.com/p/pidocumenter/.
If you want to help with improving the code, please join the group and help improve the product.
