It’s been exciting at Troxo and we are now looking for a project manager to oversee the development and implementation of a variety of web projects. This is a client-facing role so you need to be fluent in English as we have customers around the world.

You will manage dynamic development teams in a fast paced company and make sure projects are delivered on time, within budget and in the most efficient way. You’ll need to have excellent time management abilities with a can-do attitude.

In return, we offer a more than exciting environment, excellent conditions and we make sure you have everything you need to make your work more fun and creative, say a screen like this.

Send us your CV at job at troxo dot com. We are poised to hear from you if you fit the bill.

Our development center is based in Nis, central Serbia and we welcome all candidates willing to relocate.

This is one of the posts from the how-we-do-it series.

A while ago we had a part of a project where our client NSN ASA wanted to have:

• Custom reporting with an advanced mail merge function (to create invoices, order lists, etc.)
• Easy-to-create report templates, so they can be created by non-programmers
• Simple, simple, simple
• PHP API

Our first thought of course was to find an appropriate component and use it for this project. However, we were amazed to realize there isn’t any out-of-box solution for easy report creation from PHP. There surely are a lot of ready solutions like CrystalReports, Birt, Jasper reports with iReport, but we felt none of them met the above requirements (especially simplicity).

So, here is our approach to solving this problem:

• Report data should be sent via a standardized XML. There will be no more than hands full types of XML tags in the report data.

• Report template will be created with MS Word (after all, anyone can use it, right?)

• Template will have the simplest possible tagging system, implemented as MS WORD fields. (Example: <<tablestart>><<data1>><<data2>><<data3>><<tableend>>

• There are no good Unix components for handling Word files – therefore we will implement this on windows platform and expose SOAP interface for accessing it from PHP.

Now that this is up and running here is the small illustration of our “baby” in action:

We would like to thank NSN ASA for giving us the green light to share this with you.

A part of our team working exclusively for pingdom.com is back from Sweden after talks on further work on the project. It was hard work and fun at the same time, a combination that always works well at Troxo.

The meeting was really productive and will result in many new features Pingdom’s clients will receive during 2008. After the nitty-gritty, the team got down to a crayfish party, a traditional eating and drinking celebration in Sweden.

They say “one drink for every claw”, but few of us kept up that pace. It wasn’t all partying, though. Sightseeing in Stockholm, go-cart racing, a boat trip and a visit to an amusement park were also on the agenda.

And just when you think everything goes well…Remember JAT, whose uptime we had started monitoring before we took off? Although their site has faced no downtime, their service did have a big one. Our plane (after an unpleasant malfunction) departed as many as 14 hrs behind schedule. Quite a slip