Re: HTML and PDF Reports

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:
That's why I'd like to see the CGI equivalent of the scheduling application.

You and Chris Laffra did a good job with your scheduling application and I was sorely tempted to step up to your challenge to duplicate it, but it wouldn't be good for me to temporarily sideline my own development plans. If a client asked, I'd probably budget 100 hours for it.

Not to be too mean, Nathan, but that's not much of an answer. Of course, I expect it to be the best answer we're going to see, because nobody is going to do it. And that's the whole point. Everybody is willing to say how easy their approach is, nobody is willing to actually do it.

And to say "I'd probably budget 100 hours" is roughly equivalent to asking us to trust you. Not that you're lying, but my guess is that you underestimate the work involved to add all the features this little application has, as well as getting it to perform as well as this one does. Your template approach in particular is likely to lead to high bandwidth and correspondingly lower performance.

I have already taken the time put put together a basic AJAX library, so handling asynchronous requests and responses to update pages is no longer a strech for me.

My approach would be to use Dreamweaver to layout HTML templates and use a little bit of JavaScript to toggle between them, so that the client could play with and approve a prototype of the application without any connection to the server.

Until we see something actually working, I'm very leery of a template approach, especially to something like a realtime chat window. Those NEVER work very well with standard HTML. You'd definitely have to spend some serious time getting the AJAX part of that correct.

I'm sorry I can't spend the time on it. I think it would be a good learning experience if folks were able to monitor my approach to putting it together, but the following link will show a scaled-back technique for toggling back and forth between HTML templates, which could be extended to be an interesting prototype.

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/apps/rsdc/iphone.html

Thanks for the input, Nathan. But frankly if you can't find the time even to prototype a couple of the actual business features, then I find it unlikely that anybody will. But that's what really makes EGL so much fun - we started with the basics (listing sessions) and it was so productive that we were able to add a half-dozen other features in the limited time we had available.

Joe