It’s been a month since I last updated you all on the plans for the future… so where are we?

First, good news – I have real-time train movements working in the development environment. This has taken several weeks of solid effort, writing test plans, writing code, fixing code and committing it. There’s reporting for the vast majority of trains, and cancellations, reinstatements and short-tripped trains are all handled well.

The bad news is that, when testing the system in an environment similar to production, it runs too slowly. There’s around a 4-5 minute lag through most of the day, which is unacceptable and I can’t release code in this state. There are two options – either upgrade the production server (which is expensive), or rewrite the code to be more efficient. I’ve opted for the latter.

Rest assured that real-time movements are still very much on the cards, along with a bunch of other features that I’ll write about next week.