Emilda Up Until Today

Even though Emilda is still oven-fresh on the OpenSource market, the foundations are conciderably aged. Emilda first took shape in autumn 2000 as the final project of a Perl course. Yes, initially Emilda was written in Perl, but this was something really basic, but it still was the foundation to the logics behind the entire project. This was also when the, by today almost legendary layout took shape; it is pretty remarkable to have a layout remaining unchanged for three years without having anyone nagging on it.

By New Year 2000 the Perl version of Emilda was completed, but that was when we realized the potential in making a Library Management system. So we gathered all our equipment and experienced the for that time most wearing development-week we had experienced. That was also when Emilda changed from being a Perl project to become written in PHP. This change in programming language has been internally debated resulting in the general consesus that Emilda may in future be rewritten into Perl.

What we however did wrong at this development session in February 2001 was that we did not investigate in library standards but instead only responded on the demands of the school that Emilda was to be shipped to after completing. This was probably the biggest mistake that was committed during the lifespan of Emilda; we narrowed the possible clients to exactly one school, which however was more than satisfied.

At this time Emilda was not developed under the GNU GPL but did also not cost anything. This was the first time that we inofficially decided that the next release of Emilda would be under the GNU GPL.

It was however, almost two years until the next release of Emilda saw the light of dawn; Emilda 1.0.0. In March 2003 a bid-round induced by SBUC for the renewal of their Library System came to our attention; we responded with a release plan of our next version of Emilda: 1.0.0 released under the GNU GPL and we got the order.

This was when Emilda as it can be seen today started to take shape. We had made thorough investigations in library standards and tehnology and started to implement these into the old, non-standard procedures of Emilda. After 10 weeks of hard development the first version of Emilda released under the GNU GPL was reality which includes amongst others: There is when studying the Emilda at its current state not much legacy from old versions left; from the initial Perl Emilda there is absolutely nothin left, and even from the initial PHP version of Emilda, there are only the layout and session management functions left. But again, if there is no change, how can there be development?

Looking back on the old versions of Emilda gives one nostalgic memories of what development and visions were like then, but without these visions we most certainly would not have gotten this far. Seems like megalomania and software development go together like pies and carrots; prove me wrong if You can.