Today, I discovered that ‘Brussel Noord’ was missing from the station list provided by the iRail API. This could be a serious problem as the list is used by developers to do auto-completion and searching [1]. The data is also used by clients to go from initial state (stations loaded, please select two) to the information providing state.
It’s possible that the end-user can assert that there really is a problem (as he or she might know the station exists). But not before investing some effort in a check for typos; maybe restarting the app; or as to no avail, curse in agony hoping for a better response the second time around. Whatever the action, the results will be the same: the widget creator shall hence forth be deemed as unreliable in the users’ mind.
As there is really no way of telling that the station list is correctly loaded, there can also be no measure of quality of the service provided by the iRail API. As I explain in this post I attempt to rectify that situation by providing our fellow iRail developers with the beginnings of something called continuous integration.
[1] luckily the error occurs on the development branch, no need to worry if you are an end-user of iRail
The iRail.be Project (
I took some time this weekend to figure out how to do filesharing from linux to mac using the AFP protocol.