haskelldb-users

[Haskelldb-users] Survey

[<ch...@dt...>]

Hi everyone! As some of you are aware, the project deadline (our work on
HaskellDB is a school project) for HaskellDB is drawing near. As part
of that, we are writing some documentation on what it is, how we have
structured the project and so on.

In this report, we would like to include some opinions from our users. We
figure a nice way of doing this would be through conducting an interview 
with
some of you. I have written down some questions below, and it would help us
greatly if you could take some time to answer them.

Oh, and while positive feedback is always nice, I am a big fan of
negative feedback too, so be sure to voice any complaints you have. :)
All questions are of course voluntary, you do not have to answer all of
them. You can be anonymous in the final report if you like (it will
probably be published on the Internet).

Questions:

- What is your name, and current occupation?

- What is your level of experience with Haskell?

- How did you first come into contact with HaskellDB?

- What do you use HaskellDB for? We would love to have a longer description
  of any projects you are working on, to prove that it really is used. :)

- Please rate (on a scale from 1-10) HaskellDB in these departments, also
  include any comments you may have on the areas here:
  * Features
  * Ease of use
  * Documentation
  * User Support

- What do you regard as HaskellDB's main strengths?

- What do you regard as HaskellDB's main weaknesses?

- How would you like to see HaskellDB improved on in the future?

- Any final comments you want to add?

/Anders

Re: [Haskelldb-users] Survey

[Jeremy S. <jer...@li...>]

Hello,

> Questions:
> 
> - What is your name, and current occupation?

Jeremy Shaw, Software Engineer.

> - What is your level of experience with Haskell?

I have two years of self-taught experience. I would rate myself as an
intermediate level user.

> - How did you first come into contact with HaskellDB?

I found Daan Leijen's original version around a year ago, and did a
trivial port to Hugs+FreeBSD+MySQL.

> - What do you use HaskellDB for? We would love to have a longer description
>   of any projects you are working on, to prove that it really is used. :)

Science - A simple web-base program for tracking my girlfried's daily
stats, such as body temperature. The original version ran under
Hugs+FreeBSD+MySQL, and was quite slow. The current version is
compiled with GHC 6.2, and is nice and quick.

Porcupine - A web-based collaboration tool. There is really a lot I
could say about this, but I don't even know where to begin. It will be
a bit like, bugzilla, cvs, and microsoft project all rolled into one,
with RSS feeds, instant messaging gateways, and capabilities based
security.

Autobuilder RSS feeds - At Lindows, we have an autobuilder which can
check source out of CVS and build it. After a package is built, the
autobuilder sends an email to let you know if it suceeded or
failed. It also includes some links to more details about the
build. However, I find the emails to be annoying, so I wrote an RSS
feed generator for the autobuilder. The RSS feed has several
advantages over the email solution:

(1) Subscription to a feed is all controlled via the RSS reader. The
    email solution currently has no automated way of subscribing or
    unsubscribing. You must actually type in SQL commands to be added
    or removed.

(2) Faster! The links to the extra meta data take you to some page
    that is really slow (written in perl). This same information is
    included directly in the RSS feed, so you don't even have to click
    on anything.

(3) Better history viewing - Because each package is in its own
    seperate feed, and not mixed up with all my other email, I can
    quickly view the build history for any package.



Automatically bug generator - Just last week, I used haskelldb in a
program that analyzed changes to an arch repository, and automatically
generated a bunch of bugs in bugzilla. This is a huge time saver.

Menu Mangler interface - Today I will be starting a web-based
programming for populating the menu mangler database. The menu mangler
is a program that takes .debs and rearranges their menu entries. The
web interface will allow you to add override information to the menu
mangler database.

JiffyBooks - This weekend, I will be starting a web-based alternative
to QuickBooks for my own use.

> - Please rate (on a scale from 1-10) HaskellDB in these departments, also
>   include any comments you may have on the areas here:
>   * Features
>   * Ease of use
>   * Documentation
>   * User Support

> - What do you regard as HaskellDB's main strengths?

(1) strong type-checking 
(2) I like writing haskell code instead of SQL

> - What do you regard as HaskellDB's main weaknesses?

The very long error messages generated when you have a minor type errors in a query, insert, update, etc.

> - How would you like to see HaskellDB improved on in the future?

It would be cool if it could use template haskell to query the
database type interface at compile-time instead of having to use
DBDirect. Of course, this would not always be better, and it is also
GHC specific.

> - Any final comments you want to add?

My writing skills today really suck. If you actually want to use
anything I have written, verbatim, let me know and I will send you a
better written version.

> /Anders

Re: [Haskelldb-users] Survey

[Shae M. E. <sh...@Sc...>]

Anders H=C3=B6ckersten <ch...@dt...> writes:

> - What is your name, and current occupation?

Shae Erisson, self-employed programmer and web developer.

> - What is your level of experience with Haskell?

About three years self taught experience, intermediate Haskeller

> - How did you first come into contact with HaskellDB?

I found Daan's page, desperately wanted it for my web dev jobs.

> - What do you use HaskellDB for? We would love to have a longer descripti=
on
>   of any projects you are working on, to prove that it really is used. :)

curryspondence:
http://shapr.homelinux.net/cgi-bin/wash/SearchML
darcs get http://shapr.homelinux.net/repos/curryspondence

I'm planning on adding HaskellDB support to lambdabot.
I'd like to do professional webdev in Haskell, nearly every webdev app requ=
ires
nicely abstracted database support.

> - Please rate (on a scale from 1-10) HaskellDB in these departments, also
>   * Features

9 - nearly perfect

>   * Ease of use

9 - nearly perfect

>   * Documentation

10 (I wrote some myself ;-)

>   * User Support

10: many problems were fixed just a few hours after I reported them
    my questions were always quickly answered on #haskelldb

> - What do you regard as HaskellDB's main strengths?

type checking generated SQL code
ability to use higher order queries

> - What do you regard as HaskellDB's main weaknesses?

can be verbose?
HaskellDB still needs more demo apps to gain a critical mass of users and
maintainers before the current projects ends.

> - How would you like to see HaskellDB improved on in the future?

I'd like to see per-backend optimization plugins

> - Any final comments you want to add?

HaskellDB rocks! keep up the good work!
--=20
Shae Erisson  -  putStr $ fix("HELLO\n"++)  -  http://www.ScannedInAvian.or=
g/
OSDir: Community building... interesting... what's the secret sauce?
Limi: Irresponsible sleep patterns.
-- Alexander Limi, one of the Plone founders http://osdir.com/Article199.ph=
tml