-----Original Message----- From: River Tarnell [mailto:river@wikimedia.org] Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2008 4:10 PM To: lar@miltontrainworks.com; toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator?
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Larry Pieniazek:
I was struck by the thought that the specification and generation of reports is something that many commercial tools do.
while i imagine there are several tools that could be adapted to our use, i think it makes more sense to NIH this
As a consultant in real life, I woud be remiss not to raise this as a possibility... why reinvent wheels unless one needs to? But on the other hand... if it IS needful, an examination of why often flushes out additional requirements and good stuff.
for the usual reasons:
- it's very simple; maybe even easier than learning and
adapting an existing system
It depends on how powerful of a report generator/designer you want... a simple one is easy enough to do but one as robust as Cognos isn't.... it would be a major development effort. What are the requirements here? If simplicity is all that's needed, then yes.
- we can make it work exactly how we want (in particular,
being easy for users to use)
This is a strong plus for doing it ourselves, especially since we don't necessairly want random end users running random queries.
- the MediaWiki schema is kind of weird and teaching
external software to use it is a pain
Most of these tools run against MySQL, not against anything else. So would any query tool we did ourselves, presumably, so this isn't a factor. MW has a weird schema, but that's going to be the same either way
- it's fun ;)
This is a strong plus for doing it ourselves too!
In the end, I have no idea yet what the right answer is but talking about it should help.
Larry Pieniazek Hobby mail: Lar at Miltontrainworks dot com