Updated com_weight

I just tried out my old component (written some time in 2005, amazingly): com_weight. It’s a weight table written as a component for Joomla, as the PHP version of my programming test in different languages.

It all started with me trying to lose weight in preparation of going to the military, where I knew I was going to be subjected to a strict regime of workout. So I wrote something that kept track of how I was doing, since I really don’t care about my weight otherwise.

The first incarnation was in Tcl/Tk. It was a standalone application/script, and it did its job pretty well. To this day, of all the versions it’s the one that has the best UI. Later on I wanted a web-ready version and rewrote the script in Perl. At that point, I started realizing that the weight table had great potential as a test of a language and my skills in it, so I rewrote it in Java (ugly as sin) and then as Joomla component.

I uploaded the version to this site, and tried installing it on my local machine in a test environment, just to see how it works. Well, it doesn’t: the XML file needed for the installation had a bunch of files missing, a single file that didn’t exist, and I hadn’t updated the table definition to match the queries…

It didn’t take much time, and I had everything fixed. The code, thank goodness, wasn’t broken: I had probably just not updated the XML file and the installer after I made manual changes. Shame on me.

Now, the com_weight.zip you’ll find in the download section works just marvelously, and I recommend it to anyone that wants to track their weight online.