About

ENtree was designed to keep track of the family tree structures that result from the fraternity/sorority tradition of big brothers and big sisters.

This site represents members of the Epsilon Nu chapter of the Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Service Fraternity, and the Delta Delta chapter of the Tau Beta Sigma National Honorary Band Service Sorority.

Version History

Version 4.0

Released February 1, 2010. Version 4.0 moves the underlying database system back to MySQL from PostgreSQL. The migration decision was made so the software could be run on a wider-range of pre-existing system setups. A LAMP stack with MySQL is just about standard among web hosting companies, and I wanted this software to be easily portable. A modified preorder tree-traversal method is still employed to store and retrieve records, but there's no longer any PL/SQL code. All of the insertion logic is now handled with PHP and MySQL transactions.

Version 3.0

Released April 25, 2007. This version was a complete redesign of the underlying database structure. It used a PostgreSQL database rather than MySQL, and ran a lot of PL/SQL code for insertion logic. The tree was stored in a modified preorder tree-traversal method, producing much more efficient queries. Version 2.0 would make one database query per person listed in a tree, while 3.0 made one query for an entire tree. For large trees, this meant a loading time on the order of hundreds of times faster. CodeIgniter (a PHP framework) was used so I could take advantage of its libraries and plugins, especially caching.

Version 2.0

Released August 2nd, 2004. This version ran from a MySQL database and worked much faster than its predecessor. The tree entries were stored in an adjacency list method. Although using a database, the efficiency of loading one person's family tree was poor. The cost of inserting a new record was cheap, while retrieving a record was expensive. Considering records are only added once or twice a year but accessed thousands of times in a year, the efficiency was placed in the wrong area.

Version 1.0

Released in January of 2004, this was a complete working version of ENtree. Many major problems had been fixed, especially concerning the look and style.

Version 0.1

This was a testing version of the program released in June of 2003. There weren't many features, it was slow, and the interface was very klunky.