Avis Sagra Viewer is a very small and simple application developed as volunteering work. The context is the following:
- AVIS is an italian nationwide non-profit association focused on handling blood donations, see AVIS Website
- Many towns have their own section of AVIS, handling the local organization of donation campaigns, getting people to know the association and generally promoting blood donations
- All the associations are also funded in various manner locally (by local governments, local donations and specific initiatives)
- One of these initiatives the local branch I belong to organizes a local feast ("sagra") where all the money gotten from serving food goes to the association, to use in the ways described above
- In this context, we use a free but proprietary software to process orders, get the cash etc
- A new requirement came from the cooks in the kitchen to have a way to monitor near-real time how much of each dish had been ordered
- The proprietary software had no easy way to get this information, the only way was through admin access (which we were not sure to leave available to everybody) and in a rather convoluted way.
- So we decided to develop a small utility that could connect to the shared database (in the production configuration a sqlite file on one of the PCs, but easily swappable in a configuration file)
The choice went to Kotlin as a language, using Compose Multiplatform as the UI library, Exposed as the SQL interface.
There are multiple reasons for this, I will try to list all below:
- I chose Kotlin for three reasons:
- To learn a new language, that according to many surveys is among the most loved languages.
- Having worked from many years with Java, taking a JVM language with good interoperability with Java itself gave me assurance that, at worst, I could java write java code if needed
- Knowledge on the toolchain (Gradle etc) and IDE (IntellJ), due to the Java projects worked in the past
On the other hand Compose Multiplatform was not my first choice. At first I was only focused on making a desktop app, therefore using JavaFX and/or its Kotlin port TornadoFX. While looking around, I discovered the Compose library and it seemed a better fit:
- It allows to build a phone app if so desired. This was not a concern currently, but it could be of use in the future
- The skillset is more applicable in future projects, so it is not wasted knowledge
- It has a nice API
Exposed on the other hand was chose only on gut feeling, but after using I honestly think it was a good choice, the API is decent and very fluent.