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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:

http://static.flickr.com/54/139230422_f453d38430_t.jpg http://static.flickr.com/50/139230433_0d87a2f0ae_t.jpg http://static.flickr.com/47/139230434_f91f8d0b01_t.jpg

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:

http://static.flickr.com/48/137206420_07ca331974_t.jpg

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!

Tyler / 2006-05-03 00:09:

Is this open source? Is there a place to download this could be just what I am looking for :-)

Roberto Alsina / 2006-05-03 00:32:

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 :-)

Gonzalo / 2006-05-03 02:35:

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?

Roberto Alsina / 2006-05-03 03:28:

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.

Gonzalo / 2006-05-03 04:00:

Maybe, there could be a way to define who the intended recipient is and tie to a system account?

Roberto Alsina / 2006-05-03 04:33:

Gonzalo: don't know any. If you find it, let me know.

Christian / 2006-05-03 04:54:

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!

DeeJay1 / 2006-05-03 11:15:

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...


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