Posted by Mike P2 on 05/02/07 21:08

CptDondo wrote:
> Yup.... Basically, we have some "stuff" out there in the wild. Our
> customers want to know what their "stuff" is doing. So we're building
> web-enabled controllers for the "stuff".
>
> Now, this "stuff" sits out there in some pretty remote places, and some
> of our customers have lots of "stuff". They don't want to visit 600
> individual web pages to see how all of their "stuff" is doing so they
> want a single website to show them that.
>
> We're looking for something that can a) poll the "stuff" on a regular
> basis, and put the results into a database, and b) display the data in
> the database on a website in some sort of logical manner, as in a
> spreadsheet.
>
> I would guess that we would need to write most of the data collection
> backend, but the frontends should be around; something with sessions,
> access control since we don't want customer A to mess with B's "stuff",
> a decent UI, and so on.
>
> Does that explain it a little better? (Sorry if it was too vague....)
>
> --Yan


A cron and a short script are probably all you need for updating this
top-secret "stuff". PEAR probably has something for displaying data
from a database table in an HTML table (as an ASP.net control might do
by default), but I don't think you're going to find anything specific
enough to just get your data like that and let customers log in to see
it. You might use a CMS like Drupal for sessions and authentication
and stuff like that, and then you would just need to alter it to fit
your project and add the functionality (I don't think this should be a
lot of work at all) to display that user's "stuff" data.

Honestly, to me it doesn't seem all that complicated (maybe it would
be more complicated if the project were described more), I would
suggest having one person code the whole thing. It could be done with
one script for the cron job, and another for login/view stuff & links/
some other functionality, although the latter should probably be split
up into two pages (or more if this really is more complicated than you
described). I think it could be done in a day or two if you could find
someone with nothing else to do.

-Mike PII

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