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DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

democrats.github.com

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Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#11
I like how the registration form shows the form validation errors inline: http://i.imgur.com/U5QL1.png

Looking at the source view(https://github.com/democrats/voter-registration/blob/master/...) it doesn't seems there is some extra markup, unless I am missing something.

So, How can I implement the same in my rails app?

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#12
post #4
post #2

The first part of the software license looks to be BSD/MIT-like with the to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,... sentence, but then there's this paragraph: This permission does not include: (a) any use of the Software other than for its intended purpose; or (b) any use of t…

I imagine that that's CYA; one thing both party organizations have in common: they are saturated with lawyers.

I can see how (b) gives them legal cover, since it says that you can't use the software to forge voter registrations. However, (a) implies that you can't reuse the code as the basis for software that's used to fill out some unrelated type of PDF form, like a tax form. So the terms of the license are really too restrictive to make the software legally safe for anyone else to use -- my employer's lawyers would never allow me to use this software as part of our commercial product. So while it may be technically "open source", it's not really a contribution to the free software community.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#13
post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

> One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format".

As others have pointed out, the (not really open source) license doesn't allow any uses for other purposes.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#14

I like how the registration form shows the form validation errors inline: http://i.imgur.com/U5QL1.png Looking at the source view( https://github.com/democrats/voter-registration/blob/master/... ) it doesn't seems there is some extra markup, unless I am missing something. So, How can I implement the same in my rails app?

That's simple_form at work. Great little gem.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#15
post #13
post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

> One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". As others have pointed out, the (not really open source) license doesn't allow any uses for other purposes.

Maybe you can't copy-paste it and replace part of its insides as with other apps, but it's still useful if learning and testing on local, I guess.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#16
post #10
post #2

The first part of the software license looks to be BSD/MIT-like with the to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,... sentence, but then there's this paragraph: This permission does not include: (a) any use of the Software other than for its intended purpose; or (b) any use of t…

In particular this means that this is anything but open source (at least if you go by the OSI definition, which I do).

It also precludes it from being free software, as defined by the FSF.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#17
post #13
post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

> One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". As others have pointed out, the (not really open source) license doesn't allow any uses for other purposes.

It would be silly to copy an application this simple verbatim, but that same property makes it very easy to read.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#18
post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format

FWIW, I've found that "generate HTML and feed it through wkhtmltopdf" is a surprisingly effective way of doing this.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#19
post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format FWIW, I've found that "generate HTML and feed it through wkhtmltopdf" is a surprisingly effective way of doing this.

You lose control of pagination when you do this, but, more generally, we're talking about business processes where things need to look exactly the way they usually do.

That said: I used to do the same thing, and it works pretty well.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format FWIW, I've found that "generate HTML and feed it through wkhtmltopdf" is a surprisingly effective way of doing this.

You lose control of pagination when you do this, but, more generally, we're talking about business processes where things need to look exactly the way they usually do. That said: I used to do the same thing, and it works pretty well.

I managed to get the pagination I needed via judicious use of "page-break-before: always", but yes, this is more a strategy for "I need to programatically generate PDF files" than "I need to generate PDF files which look exactly like this".
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