Introducing WebDev Control Panel

Once upon a time there was a little project called the XAMPP Control Panel. An associate of mine had a hankering for a similar application to control specific services used for web development on his local machine, so I looked to adapt Jono’s project to his needs. However, as is often the case in these scenarios, I ended up scrapping the vast majority of his code and starting from near-scratch.

In a very short space of time a working result was achieved, but said associate no longer had a requirement for due to a change of platform. Rather than let it languish, I started adapting it to be more generic and removed some additional (and not fully implemented) functionality to create the WebDev Control Panel.

A project which promptly vanished into the depths of my hard disk and was mostly forgotten about. I fetched it out from time-to-time and tweaked a bit here, changed a bit there, but overall it sat collecting dust. I fully intended it to be released as Free software, but was loath to release in its current form.

Jumping forward to a couple of weeks ago, I needed to re-acquaint myself with Python, so I dusted off the project and started polishing it. I made the code more object-oriented; I converted it from a fixed list of services to a dynamic one (controlled by a config file); and finally I made it ready for translation.

Finally the time had come, and I could find no decent reason for putting it off any longer. I had to release it.

So, after that long introduction, here is the WebDev Control Panel. Enjoy.