VICIDIAL web-client fully functional beta 0.0.28 release

Well we think we've finished it, at least good enough for a beta. VICIDIAL web-client is now fully functional with inbound and auto-predictive dialing and has almost all of the functions of the Perl/Tk client(only prettier and much easier to set up), and it does some functions better than the Tk app.

We've tested it a little bit in production and it worked great. Now we need to have others out there test it and find those bugs that we couldn't.

The vicidial web-app(beta 0.0.28) [vicidial.php] just needs to have it's folder installed on a web server with PHP and MySQL access to your astguiclient database.

We use a combination of PHP scripts, Javascript and XMLHTTPRequest(also referred to as AJAX). This allows for the main page to only be loaded once while data is still being updated at a regular interval through the use of other PHP pages being loaded in the background. Another good thing about how XMLHTTPRequest works is that it is non-blocking, meaning that if one process fails or is hung up it won't usually cause a failure or lockup of the whole application which is essential for this kind of application.

We tried this technology about a year ago but found browser support lacking, but after Firefox 1.0 came out and we did some stress tests, it passed with flying colors. We have been able to have both the vicidial and astguiclient web apps up and running on Firefox for over week without crashing. Sadly the same can not be said of any Internet Explorer browser because of Microsoft's choice to use ActiveX to do it's implememtation of XMLHTTPRequest. Because of ActiveX's horrible garbage collection, the memory will leak until either the iexplore.exe process is ended or about 3 hours of running and then it will just crash on it's own. This is a known bug in IE and Microsoft has no plans to fix it. So keep in mind that while our client apps do work with IE 5.0+ they will crash after a few hours.


The screenshot hasn't changed from the previous release:
http://astguiclient.sf.net/screenshots/vdc-web_alpha_0.0.22.gif

Installation instructions:
- you must be running astGUIclient version 1.1.5
- first go to the experimental downloads section of the project site:
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/experimental_code/
and download the following file:
- agc_update_0.1.5-2.zip - (unzip on your web server and edit config the dbconnect.php)