ADE Scheduler: a scheduling tool made for humans

ADE-Scheduler is a web-application made by (former) students which is destined to be used by UCLouvain members (students, academics,...).

Project creators

Eertmans Jérome (active maintainer)
Navarre Louis
Poncelet Gilles (active maintainer)

We are three former students from the Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain (EPL) and were starting our first master year at the start of the project.

Why such a tool ?

The currently used scheduling tool used by the UCLouvain, ADE, lacks an intuitive interface and general usability. Therefore, we decided to create ADE-Scheduler as a "wrapper" around this tool to make it more intuitive, nice and complete.

Before that, we were using the excellent ADE2ICS made by Corentin Damman which allowed to create subscription links where one could select its events (TPs, CMs, etc). ADE-Scheduler is therefore an improvement of this tool.

Key dates

2019 - August: start of the project
2019 - September: access to the API of ADE and release of the first version of the tool
2020 - Summer: complete overhaul of the tool to make it more attractive, intuitive and mobile-friendly.
2020 - September: release of the second version of the tool
2021 - September: 2 years of service, Python 3.9 upgrade and 3500+ users
2021 - December: 7000+ users
2022 - January: moving auth. system to UCLouvain OAuth, thereby resetting the number of users to 0 on January 29nth, 2022
2022 - Summer: first major contribution from students to the ADE Scheduler repository

How does it work ?

Back-end

Data source

Thanks to the access to the API of ADE, we obtain all the information in a XML format. Those are up-to-date with the infos you will find on the ADE website. We are mainly interested in two type of informations:

Event list sorted by course
Location of every UCLouvain classroom, auditorium, etc.

Data treatment

The backend of ADE-Scheduler is written in Python using the Flask micro-framework. Other packages are also used to supply many useful functions to enhance the overall user experience.
Among those, we use pandas pandas to optimise the performances, ics to convert the schedules in the iCal format - and many more.

We also use a Redis server to store user sessions and buffer data, as well as a PostgreSQL database to store user accounts and schedules.

Front-end

Client-side logic is handled using Vue, a JavaScript reactive framework. Moreover, the events are displayed on a calendar generated with the help of the FullCalendar package.

The UI is made mainly with the help of Bootstrap, which handles all the CSS and makes the website enjoyable and mobile-friendly.

Functionalities and comparison with ADE

In short, ADE Scheduler offers the same information as ADE, but in a much more elegant manner. A side by side comparison of the two sites just speaks for itself:

But an intuitive design is not the only advantage of ADE Scheduler, it also comes with several useful tools which ADE does not have:

... and many more !

Documentation

The website's documentation is available on the help page.

Future improvements

Here are listed a series of issues we would like to implement in the future:

Implement a complete testing suite to enable easy and robust CI
Complete the help section with more videos, tips, etc.

We are open to any suggestions !

Contributing

This application being open source, everyone is more than welcome to contribute in any way ! To see more details about our contributing guidelines, please refer to contributing.

Any suggestion, idea or bugs are much appreciated, and you can contact us at all times either by mail or directly on this repository.

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ADE-Scheduler / ADE-Scheduler

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