| Perl Script: Apollia's Primitive Invoice Generator v2.0 |
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Saturday, July 2nd, 2016 04:32:44 GMT |
| Software |
An old, messily-coded, yet still useful Perl script. Generates an HTML page containing a list of tasks billed by the hour, and/or a list of projects with a fixed price. Automatically totals up the amount due.
Even though this script is version 2.0, I never released it to the world before. I first wrote it maybe over a decade ago, and was recently reminded of its existence by a feature request from the person I made it for.
The code is really messy, and in retrospect, definitely not the best way to do things. But, it works well enough anyway, and the person I made it for has been happy with it for all these years.
So, this script is proof that you don't have to write the most perfect, elegant code to get something done adequately.
Perhaps I'd make it possible to input data via a spreadsheet, or maybe an Hjson text file, or either one. And then maybe somehow convert the input to XML, and transform it into a nice-looking HTML page using XSLT. :-)
Or maybe not. I don't really feel like thinking it through very carefully, because it's tiresome to dwell on such boring things as writing invoice software.
But, if I had to write it again from scratch, I'd probably do things much differently. I'd probably much rather write it in PHP instead of Perl, since despite much struggling with Perl, I'm still much more comfortable with PHP than Perl and probably most other languages.