Home

Thanks for your interest in phpqbt. This is a program that connects to the National Weather Service EMWIN network. I wrote this code to replace PerlEMWIN by Michael Ezzell and Tyler Allison in a project I was working on. As time has gone on, my dependence on this code has decreased (with my focus shifting to new alerting technologies such as CAP) so I have decided to open-source my new EMWIN code.

Why create this?

PerlEMWIN is a really nice and flexible product, but it has a few drawbacks. It's complex, it's shaky at times, and it's rather old and unmaintained. Back when I first started experimenting with it, I managed to trash a few filesystems with it (something that doesn't happen with phpqbt, as it stores unfinished products in memory instead of on disk). I think something new is needed.

Comparisons to PerlEMWIN

Most of the code in phpqbt is built from the ground up, loosely based on PerlEMWIN (aside from being written in PHP and not Perl, obviously). I used the PerlEMWIN code as a reference in the ByteBlaster/QBT implementation. Some code, like the parse_UGC function, is a direct port from the original Perl code. In my opinion, writing filters and plugins for this software is a lot easier than for PerlEMWIN.

I Welcome Collaboration

If you have anything to add to the software, please let me know. If you have some coding knowledge, feel free to work on it yourself and send any patches back to me. If you don't, open an issue and we'll see what can get done. I'm also reachable by email, you can find it on my GitHub profile.

Thanks again! I hope you find this software useful.

-Drew Kirkman