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