FaxWeb is done
FaxWeb, a web frontend for mgetty+sendfax is finished. It works. It's probably close to bugfree ;-)
The missing piece is a nicer reimplementation of respond (and this one will be cross-platform, too) using PyQt, which is 50% done.
I am only missing how to implement portable systray icons. On Mac they make no sense, on Linux I have it working, on Windows I have no idea.
Here's the simple interface for faxweb:
It even has a little AJAXy "the page doesn't reload" niceties courtesy of MochiKit!
Also from MochiKit, the nicer, rounded look&feel. Compare to this older, uglier one:
I know the new one is not good, either, but I have decided that since I can't aim for awesome, I should aim for adequate, and settle for boring and harmless.
Of course, if any CSS/XHTML guru volunteers for a makeover, I'd be very happy, since I use the same CSS everywhere (even on parts of this blog ;-).
All in all, a pleasure to write this thing, thanks to CherryPy!
Is this open source? Is there a place to download this could be just what I am looking for :-)
Sure, email me. (little yellow envelope in the blog).
It's not tested, since I haven't gone to my customer yet, but it's not too hard to make work :-)
Is there an authentication system for the web interface?
If there is, this could be a killer application. I currently don't know of an easy to install application that offers this same functionality.
Please make sure that this gets packaged by the big distributions (suse, debian,etc) as the FLOSS world is in dire need of an easy to use FAX app with a web interface.
What would be even better is if the device detection became part of the SOLID framewor, which should be easy to do for serial devices.
Finally, I think this is worthy of a separate public project with its own web-page.
What do you think?
Gonzalo: This is just a simple frontend for mgetty+sendfax, so whatever hardware detection can/should be done is way below this app's knowledge.
About authentication, it should be fairly simple to introduce it for sent faxes, but for the received pool it doesn't make much sense, since there is no way of knowing who is the intended recipient.
As for packaging/page/etc... I will install it at my customer's system first.
Then if it works nicely, maybe I will bother packaging it.
Fax is a dying technology anyway.
Maybe, there could be a way to define who the intended recipient is and tie to a system account?
Gonzalo: don't know any. If you find it, let me know.
I just wanted to add that it really does look great, and also looks extremely useful. If you do get it published and recognized, open sourced-like, thanks!
Hmm, that looks great! I hope it's i18n capable so we can all translate it into our favourite languages :)
If there's a tgz out there somewhere you can be sure we'll get it into PLD Linux.
BTW some authentication for received faxes could possibly be done by using the incoming fax number if it's availible (so all faxes from company x would be availible only for user y) - just a thought.
Now, where was my old rs-232 modem...