Semi-OT: Database for "average" users

[David Mayerlen]

Hey,

 Absolutely classic problem. In the old days your vet sat at home in his
basement and built a pet database using Filemaker Pro. You'd walk up to
the receptionist with your cat, she'd look up your cat and say "right,
this is little Felix who has six toes on his front left paws and he was
last here six months ago. That vet was not a programmer but was able to do
really sophisticated stuff.

 Today people write just about as much code as my dad wrote in the 70's
with Fortran. The worst of all are Java and .Net where you have PHD
Comp-sci folks churning out thousands of lines of code. With PHP or Cold
Fusion there is some saving but as soon as you hit the database you hit a
wall of complexity. I'm a long-time Perl programmer but I'm quick to
recognize what a nightmare it is in most programmer's hands.

 C. J. Dent (sp) was the inventor of SQL I believe. It was way way worse
before he came along in the 80's. He's been working on simplifying much
more now with "business rules" engines...

 There are application builder tools out there which I'm quite unfamiliar
with and they simplify life to an amazing degree BUT they generate code
and after the first pass of adding your own custom business logic to it
you are stuck with a mess.

 Along comes our company "Upstart". Three years ago we hit this problem
where a client asked us for a relatively simple database driven app and we
hit a wall of "laziness". We knew we could write a bit of code, design a
few database tables etc. but we also knew that every time the client
changes his mind we'd be stuck adjusting SQL statements and stuff all over
the place and doing a complete recursion test. We also knew we'd have to
charge him for that. There had to be a better way.

 We built this thing called "The Pointt" which allows one to create
database driven apps whereby most of the common tasks are already sitting
and waiting to be used.

 Doesn't matter if you need a database of cats, or clothes or orders or
people who work in departments in companies ... you probably need "insert,
update, delete, import and search". You probably want to make people
"login" to do these tasks.

 We used a really wierd-o but extremely simple data warehouse data model
where every "attribute" of an "object" (person, thing, order, ...
whatever) is equal. With The Pointt you can "draw" your objects. The
"insert, update, delete, import and search" screens draw themselves. You
then lay overtop your really pretty design. If you need the data to come
out in a fancy way like generating some crazy spreadsheet report then you
are stuck writing a bit of SQL but only then!!! There is a builtin
dashboard showing aggregate numbers of your data and a simple export to
spreadsheet.

 We are many versions into this, have deployed many apps for Canon,
Unilever, Mattel and others ... and are plowing ahead. Nobody we have ever
showed this thing to has ever seen anything like it.

 We don't even know what to call it and have been struggling with the
issue for years but at the moment we call it an "Information Management
System".

 We built it in Cold Fusion instead of PHP because we wanted it to be able
to take advantage of running not only on a simple single Linux server but
also to deploy on a fortune 500 complex high-end IBM/Sun distributed
computing crazy-failover-balanced Java J2EE environment.

 Would be happy to demo this at a TLUG. The beginner type can build a
database driven web app in minutes!!! The expert type can build a very
complex database driven web app in days instead of weeks or months.

=========================================================
| David Mayerlen
| Upstart Associates
| http://www.upstartx.com
| dmz-yBkl/NpmZwtWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org
| 416-424-6739
=========================================================

On Mon, 2 May 2005, phil wrote:

> On Apr 30, 2005, at 3:54 PM, billt-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 03:36:30PM -0400, phil wrote:
> >>
> >>   With DB software, it doesn't seem that there's any provision for
> >> "just
> >> getting something simple accomplished" before leaping off into the
> >> world of normalization, foreign keys, and the rest of the jargon.
> >>
> > I think you just answered your own questions. Databases are not meant
> > to do something simple. The things you want when you have something
> > simple to do is a spreadsheet. The caveat there is knowing when
> > something is simple and when it only seems simple.
>
> I don't really buy the idea that a spreadsheet is functionally
> equivalent to a simple database.  But ignoring that for the moment,
> there's still the problem of different levels of complexity involving
> projects that people agree *do* require a database.  Among those,
> there's still an issue of having an expertise requirement that's not
> proportional to the complexity of the problem.   At the moment, I can't
> think of another class of software that I've ever used that's as
> forbidding to beginners...not development tools, not even application
> servers.
>
> Since Lotus Agenda had some features of self-organization and a great
> deal of beginner ease of use, I keep watching the Chandler project with
> hope.  The overview sounds good, but the implementation details don't
> seem much beyond Palm Desktop.
>
> ........................
> Phillip Mills
> Multi-platform software development
> (416) 224-0714
>
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