[Openinteract-help] suggestions

[Jon D. <jd...@nc...>]

  I've been playing with OI for a bit over a week now.  I'm pretty impressed,
  but I'm having a little trouble getting acclimated.

  The project I am working on is porting an existing HTML::Mason application
  that I wrote last year to OI.  Mason is OK, but it doesn't really provide
  as much as I would like.

  The application is a site to register for network connections at a fairly
  large tradeshow.  We provide about 10 different types of connections to over
  150 exhibitors.  Many of the exhibitors register for multiple connections.
  The site allows them to go in an request their connections, specify at what
  location in the booth they want the fiber to come to, etc.  At any time
  until we close registration they can come in and modify their requests.
  This data is all kept in a database (PostgreSQL) and used by those of us
  building the network to determine how much gear we need to borrow, etc.  So,
  the second set of users for this site are the people on the networking
  committee.

  I have developed a database schema that handles the data that we need to
  collect and maintain pretty well.  My first question is should I try to use
  SPOPS as my interface to this data?  SPOPS has a lot of nice things, but the
  database is fairly normalized and SPOPS seems most suited to single table
  applications.  I need to do a lot of JOINs (thank goodness that Pg now
  supports OUTER JOINs -- I had to emulate them with UNIONs last year).  This
  leads to my second question -- how do I use SPOPS to access a normalized
  database?

  That said, I like SQL, so I don't necessarily want it hidden from me.  Is
  using SPOPS::SQLInterface a viable option?  The man page seems to gently
  discourage it.

  Lastly, how is OI 2 coming along?  The CVS repository on Sourceforge doesn't
  appear to have been touched in a few weeks.

  Thanks,

Jon
-- 
Jon Dugan             |  Senior Network Engineer, NCSA Network Development
jd...@nc...  |  269 CAB, 605 E Springfield, Champaign, IL 61820
217-244-7715          |  http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~jdugan/