[News] Election day in Sardinia, Italy—powered by Servoy

The Italians have apparently taken to Servoy like fish to water. To my knowledge, they are the only language running their own Servoy forum besides the official forum. Also, several of our most technical contributions on Servoy Magazine come from this crowd (check out the contributions by Enrico Arata and Riccardo Albieri).

Apparently the Italians are doing cool things again. To quote a post by Enrico Arata a couple of days ago:

"Right now (8/9 May 2005) in Nuoro (Sardinia - Itally) residents are voting for the election of the city mayor and for the province council.

"In the Town Hall of Nuoro, journalists and political party representatives can follow the results through 'Servoy powered displays' showing real time data that is fed into the system from 'Servoy powered workstations.' Political parties, newspapers, news agencies and central government offices receive continuous updates by emails and faxes [saying] 'Servoy sent'."

Click on a couple of the links at these URLs to see the results:

http://www.comune.nuoro.it/Elezioni/Comunali2005/
http://www.comune.nuoro.it/Elezioni/Provinciali2005/

Apparently, all of the graphs, pdfs, tables and web pages are all generated with Servoy. OK, I'm officially impressed! To quote some more: "All the system was internally studied and developed using Servoy by the Comune di Nuoro itself - Servizio di Innovazione Tecnologica. Well done Giovanni Zola!"

No links given so I have no idea who or what this is. But it sounds like to me that the state of Florida could have used this guy and Servoy in 2000. (Where just a minor issue happened with "vote counting" that resulted in George W. Bush getting elected by winning the electoral vote due to winning closely contested Florida. Guess what, his brother Jeb Bush was the governor of the state at the time. Oh, and George W. Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes that year. But I digress.)

Discarding my political leanings for a moment, this is COOL! I want to know how it was done. Was it done with Servoy Headless Client? I'm stumped. So get with it my Italian friends and send me the scoop. You can't just show us something cool and not tell us how it was done! Or better yet, tell me this will be a presentation at Servoy World 2005!

Comments (4)

Patrick Ruhsert 2005-05-11

Quote: To my knowledge, they are the only language running their own Servoy forum besides the official forum. No! There is also a German forum! See http://forum.servoy.de. But it seems, that things in Germany progress a little slower :-)

Riccardo Albieri 2005-05-14

I spoke to Giovanni and here are some details: Between May 9th and May, 10th: 2.700.000 requests processed 350.000 served pages ---- The Prefecture received the results in real-time, using scheduled emails with attached PDFs. The web site was updated the same way. At the same time, 10 clients were constantly working from the press room placed in the City Council (with 2 maxi-screens each one of them showing Servoy's logo on every slide) ;-)

Giovanni Zola 2005-05-16

I have not used Servoy Headless Client. I have generated the pages web through methods scheduled every XX minutes according the preferences settings. The methods have been are executed according to variable orders in agreement with a window of preferences that allowed to order or disabled data method. The preferences are one table of Database with the settings of those report. In order launch the method, in the Database, we have used function EVAL() of a field that contains the name of the method to execute. The reports has been classifies for type Elections (Regional, National, Communal, Provincial...) and for destination: Print, WebPages, Prefettura, Commission Central etc... The Methods have composed "to the flight" code HTML, PDF's, CSS stylesheet, saved the symbols and the graphical images. After the local creation of the files they came automatically load on the Web server via ftp script.

<b>I have prepared for you some print-screen of the program that they make to understand better as it works. Ciao</b> <a href="http://www.comune.nuoro.it/Servoy/Album/Index.htm">-->> Open the screenshoot <<--</a>