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I'm working on a project at school where we have to create a small system for an RV retailer to track customers, vehicles, employees, inventory, and so on.
We've gotten to the point where we'll need to start coding pretty soon, but I'm having trouble figuring out the logistics of everything. For example, I know enough to build and use the website and database, but I don't have any idea on how to connect the two.
I know SQL fairly well. Enough to know what and where to look for the information, but I don't know enough about connecting my database to know what I'm looking for.
So what I'm looking for is a basic rundown on different options I can look and do some research on what would be best for our group.
I feel like there's a lot of information out there on how to do stuff, but I just don't have the basic information on why it's relevant and how and where to fully utilize it.
I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help clear it up.
One of the options of having a database-driven website is to use PHP.
It is a server-side scripting language, which is used to generate the dynamic content on the webpages. You can connect to the database, obtain user input using for example HTML forms, perform queries and display results on the webpage.
Essentially you build an application with a web-based user interface. PHP is supported on a vast majority of web hosting platforms.
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Closed 10 years ago.
We're currently looking at using the Force.com platform as our development platform and the sales guys and the force.com website are full of reasons why it's the best platform in the world. What I'm looking for, though, is some real disadvantages to using such a platform.
Here are 10 to get you started.
Apex is a proprietary language. Other than the force.com Eclipse plugin, there's little to no tooling available such as refactoring, code analysis, etc.
Apex was modeled on Java 5, which is considered to be lagging behind other languages, and without tooling (see #1), can be quite cumbersome.
Deployment is still fairly manual with lots of gotchas and manual steps. This situation is slowly improving over time, but you'll be disappointed if you're used to having automated deployments.
Apex lacks packages/namespaces. All of your classes, interfaces, etc. live in one folder on the server. This makes code much less organized and class/interface names necessarily long to avoid name clashes and to provide context. This is one of my biggest complaints, and I would not freely choose to build on force.com for this reason alone.
The "force.com IDE", aka force.com eclipse plugin, is incredibly slow. Saving any file, whether it be a class file, text file, etc., usually takes at least 5 seconds and sometimes up to 30 seconds depending on how many objects, data types, class files, etc. are in your org. Saving is also a blocking action, requiring not only compilation, but a full sync of your local project with the server. Orders of magnitude slower than Java or .NET.
The online developer community does not seem very healthy. I've noticed lots of forum posts go unanswered or unsolved. I think this may have something to do with the forum software salesforce.com uses, which seems to suck pretty hard.
The data access DSL in Apex leaves a lot to be desired. It's not even remotely competitive with the likes of (N)Hibernate, JPA, etc.
Developing an app on Apex/VisualForce is an exercise in governor limits engineering. Easily half of programmer time is spent trying to optimize to avoid the numerous governor limits and other gotchas like visualforce view state limits. It could be argued that if you write efficient code to begin with you won't have this problem, which is true to an extent. However there are many times that you have valid reasons to make more than x queries in a session, or loop through more than x records, etc.
The save->compile->run cycle is extremely slow, esp. when it involves zipping and uploading the entire static resource bundle just to do something like test a minor CSS or javascript change.
In general, the pain of a young, fledgling platform without the benefits of it being open source. You have no way to validate and/or fix bugs in the platform. They say to post it to their IdeaExchange. Yeah, good luck with that.
Disclaimers/Disclosures: There are lots of benefits to a hosted platform such as force.com. Force.com does regularly enhance the platform. There are plenty of things about it I like. I make money building on force.com
I see you've gotten some answers, but I would like to reiterate how much time is wasted getting around the various governor limits on the platform. As much as I like the platform on certain levels, I would very strongly, highly, emphatically recommend against it as a general application development platform. It's great as a super configurable and extensible CRM application if that's what you want. While their marketing is exceptional at pushing the idea of Force.com as a general development platform, it's not even remotely close yet.
The efficiency of having a stable platform and avoiding big performance and stability problems is easily wasted in trying to code around the limits that people refer to. There are so many limits to the platform, it becomes completely maddening. These limits are not high-end limits you'll hit once you have a lot of users, you'll hit them almost right away.
While there are usually techniques to get around them, it's very hard to figure out strategies for avoiding them while you're also trying to develop the business logic of your actual application.
To give you a simple sense of how developer un-friendly the environment is, take the "lack of debugging environment" referred to above. It's worse than that. You can only see up to 20 of the most recent requests to the server in the debug logs. So, as you're developing inside the application you have to create a "New" debug request, select your name, hit "Save", switch back to your app, refresh the page, click back to your debug tab, try to find the request that will house your debug log, hit "find" to search for the text you're looking for. It's like ten clicks to look at a debug output. While it may seem trivial, it's just an example of how little care and consideration has been given to the developer's experience.
Everything about the development platform is a grafted-on afterthought. It's remarkable for what it is, but a total PITA for the most part. If you don't know exactly what you are doing (as in you're certified and have a very intimate understanding of Apex), it will easily take you upwards of 10-20x the amount of time that it would in another environment to do something that seems like it would be ridiculously simple, if you can even succeed at all.
The governor limits are indeed that bad. You have a combination of various limits (database queries, rows returned, "script statements", future calls, callouts, etc.) and you have to know exactly what you are doing to avoid these. For example, if you have a calculated rollup "formula" field on an object and you have a trigger on a child object, it will execute the parent object triggers and count those against your limits. Things like that aren't obvious until you've gone through the painful process of trying and failing.
You'll try one thing to avoid one limit, and hit another in a never ending game of "whack a limit". In the process you'll have to drastically re-architect your entire app and approach, as well as rewrite all of your test code. You must have 75% test code coverage to deploy into production, which is actually very good thing, but combined with all of the other limits, it's very burdensome. You'll actually hit governor limits writing your test code that wouldn't come up in normal user scenarios, but that will prevent you from achieving the coverage.
That is not to mention a whole host of other issues. Packaging isn't what you expect. You can't package up your app and deliver it to users without significant user intervention and configuration on the part of the administrator of the org. The AppExchange is a total joke, and they've even started charging 5K just to get your app listed. Importing with the data loader sucks, especially if you have any triggers. You can't export all of your data in one step that includes your relationships in such a way that it can easily be re-imported into another org in a single step (for example a dev org). You can only refresh a sandbox once a month from production, no exceptions, and you can't include your data in a refresh by default unless you have called your account executive to get that feature unlocked. You can't mass delete data in custom objects. You can't change your package names. Certain things can take numerous days to complete after you have requested them, such as a data backup before you want to deploy an app, with no progress report along the way and not much sense of when exactly the export occurred. Given that there are synchronicity issues of data if there are relationships between the data, there are serious data integrity issues in that there is no such thing as a "transaction" that can export numerous objects in a single step. There are probably some commercial tools to facilitate some of this, but these are not within reach to normal developers who may not have a huge budget.
Everything else the other people said here is true. It can take anywhere from five seconds to a minute sometimes to save a file.
I don't mean to be so negative because the platform is very cool in some ways and they're trying to do things in a multi-tenant environment that no one else is doing. It's a very innovative environment and powerful on some levels (I actually like VisualForce a lot), but give it another year or two. They're partnering with VMware, maybe that will lead to giving developers a bit more of a playpen rather than a jail cell to work in.
Here are a few things I can give you after spending a fair bit of time developing on the platform in the last fortnight or so:
There's no RESTful API. They have a soap based API that you can call, but there is no way of making true restful calls
There's no simple way to take their SObjects and convert them to JSON objects.
The visual force pages are ok until you want to customize them and then it's a whole world of pain.
Visual force pages need to be bound to SObjects otherwise there's no way to get the standard input fields like the datepicker or select list to work.
The eclipse plugin is ok if you want to work by yourself, but if you want to work in a large team with the eclipse plugin forget it. It doesn't handle synchronizing to and from the server, it crashes and it isn't really helpful at all.
THERE IS NO DEBUGGER! If you want to debug, it's literally debugged by system.debug statements. This is probably the biggest problem I've found
Their "MVC" model isn't really MVC. It's a lot closer to ASP.NET Webforms. Your views are tightly coupled to not only the models but the controllers as well.
Storing a large number of documents is not feasible. We need to store over 100gb's of documents and we were quoted some ridiculous figure. We've decided to implement our document storage on amazons S3 infrastructure
Even tho the language is java based, it's not java. You can't import any external packages or libraries. Also, the base libraries that are available are severely limited so we've found ourselves implementing a bunch of stuff externally and then exposing those bits as services that are called by force.com
You can call external SOAP or REST based services but the message body is limited to 100kb's so it's very restrictive in what you can call.
In all honesty, whilst there are potential benefits to developing on something like the force.com platform, for me, you couldn't use the force.com platform for true enterprise level apps. At best you could write some basic crud style applications but once you move into anything remotely complicated I'd be avoiding it like the plague.
Wow- there's a lot here that I didn't even know were limitations - after working on the platform for a few years.
But just to add some other things...
The reason you don't have a line-by-line debugger is precisely because it's a multi-tenant platform. At least that's what SFDC says - it seems like in this age of thread-rich programming, that isn't much of an excuse, but that's apparently the reason. If you have to write code, you have "System.debug(String)" as your debugger - I remember having more sophisticated server debugging tools in Java 1.2 about 12 years ago.
Another thing I really hate about the system is version control. The Spring framework is not used for what Spring is usually used for - it's really more off a configuration tool in SFDC rather than version control. SFDC provides ZERO version-control.
You can find yourself stuck for days doing something that should seem so ridiculously easy, like, say, scheduling a SFDC report to export to a CSV file and email to a list of recipients... Well, about the easiest way to do that is create a custom object with a custom field, with a workflow rule and a Visualforce email template... and then for code you need to write a Visualforce component that streams the report data to the Visualforce email template as an attachment and you write anonymous APEX code schedule field-update of the custom object... For SFDC developers, this is almost a daily task... trying to put about five different technologies together to do tasks that seem so simple.... And this can cause management headaches and tensions too - Typically, you'd find this out after getting a suggestion to do something that doesn't work in the user-community (like someone already said), and then trying many things that, after you developed them you'd find they just don't work for some odd-ball reason - like "you can't schedule a VisualForce page", or "you can't call getContent from a schedulable context" or some other arcane reason.
There are so many, many maddening little gotcha's on the SFDC platform, that once you know WHY they're there, it makes sense... but they're still very bad limitations that keep you from doing what you need to do. Here's some of mine;
You can't get record owner information "out of the box" on pretty much any kind of record - you have to write a trigger that links the owner on create of the record to the record you're inserting. Why? Short answer because an owner can be either a "person" or a "queue", and the two are drastically different entities... Makes sense, but it can turn a project literally upside down.
Maddening security model. Example: "Manage Public Reports" permission is vastly different from "Create and Customize Reports" and that basically goes for everything on the platform... especially folders of any kind.
As mentioned, support is basically non-existent. If you are an extremely self-sufficient individual, or have a lot of SFDC resources, or have a lot of time and/or a very forgiving manager, or are in charge of a SFDC system that's working fine, you're in pretty good shape. If you are not in any of these positions, you can find yourself in deep trouble.
SFDC is a very seductive business proposition... no equipment footprint, pretty good security, fixed price, no infrastructure, AND you get web-based CRM with batchable, and schedualble processing... But as the other posters said, it is really quite a ramp-up in development learning, and if you go with consulting, I think the lowest price I've seen was $200/hour.
Salesforce tends integrate with other things years after some technologies become common-place - JSON and jquery come to mind... and if you have other common infrastructures that you want to do an integration with, like JIRA, expect to pay a lot extra, and they can be quite buggy.
And as one of the other posters mentioned, you are constantly fighting governor limits that can just drive you nuts... an attachment can NOT be > 5MB. Period. And sometimes < 3MB (if base64 encoded). Ten HTTP callouts in a class. Period. There are dozens of published governor limits, and many that are not which you will undoubtedly find and just want to run out of your office screaming.
I really, REALLY like the platform, but trust me - it can be one really cruel mistress.
But in fairness to SFDC, I'd say this: the biggest problem I find with the platform is not the platform itself, but the gargantuan expectations that almost anyone who sees the platform, but hasn't developed on it has.... and those people tend to be in positions of great authority in business organizations; marketing, sales, management, etc. Huge disconnects occur and heads roll, or are threatened to roll daily - all because there's this great platform out there with weird gotchas and thousands of people struggling daily to get their heads around why things should just work when they just don't and won't.
EDIT:
Just to add to lomaxx's comments about the MVC; In SFDC terminology, this is closely related to what's known as the "viewstate" -- aand it can be really buggy, in that what is on the VF page is not what is in the controller-class for the page. So, you have to go throught weird gyrations to synch whats on the page with what the controller is going to write to SF when you click your "save" button (or make your HTTP callout or whatever).... man, it's annoying.
I think other people have covered the disadvantages in more depth but to me, it doesn't seem to use the MVC paradigm or support much in the way of code reuse at all. To do anything beyond simple applications is an exercise in frustration compared to developing an application using something like ASP.Net MVC.
Furthermore, the tools, the data layer and the frustration of trying to refactor code or rename fields during the development process doesn't help.
I think as a CMS it's pretty cool but as a platform for non CMS applications, it's doesn't make sense to me.
The security model is also very very restrictive... but this isn't the worst part. You can't currently assert whether a user has the ability to perform a particular action.
You can check to see what their role is, but you can't check if that role has permissions to perform the current action.
Even worse is the response from tech support to "try the action and if there's an exception, catch it"
Considering Force.com is a "cloud" platform, its ability to act as a client to an external WSDL-defined service is pretty underwhelming. See http://force201.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/when-generate-from-wsdl-fails-hand-coding-web-service-calls/ for what you might end up having to do.
To all above, I am curious how the release of VMforce, allowing Java programmer to write code for Force.com, changes the disadvantages above?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/vmforcecom-redefines-the-paas-landscape/1071
I guess they are trying to address these issues. At dreamforce they mentioned they we're trying to drop the Governor limits to only 4. I'm not sure what the details are. They have a REST API for early access, and they bought heroku which is a ruby development in the cloud. They split out the database, with database.com so you can do all your web development on and your db calls using database.com.
I guess they are trying to make it as agnostic as possible. But right about now these are all announcements and early access so like their Safe Harbor statements don't purchase on what they say, only on what they currently have.
Screen scraping seems like a useful tool - you can go onto someone else's site and steal their data - how wonderful!
But I'm having a hard time with how useful this could be.
Most application data is pretty specific to that application even on the web. For example, let's say I scrape all of the questions and answers off of StackOverflow or all of the results off of Google (assuming this were possible) - I'm left with data that is not very useful unless I either have a competing question and answer site (in which case the stolen data will be immediately obvious) or a competing search engine (in which case, unless I have an algorithm of my own, my data is going to be stale pretty quickly).
So my question is, under what circumstances could the data from one app be useful to some external app? I'm looking for a practical example to illustrate the point.
It's useful when a site publicly provides data that is (still) not available as an XML service. I had a client who used scraping to pull flight tracking data into one of his company's intranet applications.
The technique is also used for research. I had a client who wanted to compare the contents of several online dictionaries by part of speech, and all of these sites had to be scraped.
It is not a technique for "stealing" data. All ordinary usage restrictions apply. Many sites implement CAPTCHA mechanisms to prevent scraping, and it is inappropriate to work around these.
A good example is StackOverflow - no need to scrape data as they've released it under a CC license. Already the community is crunching statistics and creating interesting graphs.
There's a whole bunch of popular mashup examples on ProgrammableWeb. You can even meet up with fellow mashupers (O_o) at events like BarCamps and Hack Days (take a sleeping bag). Have a look at the wealth of information available from Yahoo APIs (particularly Pipes) and see what developers are doing with it.
Don't steal and republish, build something even better with the data - new ways of understanding, searching or exploring it. Always cite your data sources and thank those who helped you. Use it to learn a new language or understand data or help promote the semantic web. Remember it's for fun not profit!
Hope that helps :)
If the site has data that would benefit from being accessible through an API (and it would be free and legal to do so), but they just haven't implemented one yet, screen scraping is a way of essentially creating that functionality for yourself.
Practical example -- screen scraping would allow you to create some sort of mashup that combines information from the entire SO family of sites, since there's currently no API.
Well, to collect data from a mainframe. That's one reason why some people use screen scraping. Mainframes are still in use in the financial world and often it's running software that has been written in the previous century. The people who wrote it might already be retired and since this software is very critical for these organizations, they really hate it when some new code needs to be added. So, screenscraping offers an easy interface to communicate with the mainframe to collect information from the mainframe and then send it onwards to any process that needs this information.
Rewrite the mainframe application, you say? Well, software on mainframes can be very old. I've seen software on mainframes that was over 30 years old, written in COBOL. Often, those applications work just fine and companies don't want to risk rewriting parts because it might break some code that had been working for over 30 years! Don't fix things if they're not broken, please. Of course, additional code could be written but it takes a long time for mainframe code to be used in a production environment. And experienced mainframe developers are hard to find.
I myself had to use screen scraping too in a software project. This was a scheduling application which had to capture the output to the console of every child process it started. It's the simplest form of screen scraping, actually, and many people don't even realize that if you redirect the output of one application to the input of another, that it's still a kind of screen scraping. :)
Basically, screen scraping allows you to connect one (web) application with another one. It's often a quick solution, used when other solutions would cost too much time. Everyone hates it, but the amount of time it saves still makes it very efficient.
Let's say you wanted to get scores from a popular sports site that did not offer the information available with an XML feed or API.
For one project we found a (cheap) commercial vendor that offered translation services for a specific file format. The vendor didn't offer an API (it was, after all, a cheap vendor) and instead had a web form to upload and download from.
With hundreds of files a day the only way to do this was to use WWW::Mechanize in Perl, screen scrape the way through the login and upload boxes, submit the file, and save the returned file. It's ugly and definitely fragile (if the vendor changes the site in the least it could break the app) but it works. It's been working now for over a year.
One example from my experience.
I needed a list of major cities throughout the world with their latitude and longitude for an iPhone app I was building. The app would use that data along with the geolocation feature on the iPhone to show which major city each user of the app was closest to (so as not to show exact location), and plot them on a 3D globe of the earth.
I couldn't find an appropriate list in XML/Excel/CSV type format anywhere easily, but I did find this wikipedia page with (roughly) the info I needed. So I wrote up a quick script to scrape that page and load the data into a database.
Any time you need a computer to read the data on a website. Screen scraping is useful in exactly the same instances that any website API is useful. Some websites, however, don't have the resources to create an API themselves; screen scraping is the developer's way around that.
For instance, in the earlier days of Stack Overflow, someone built a tool to track changes to your reputation over time, before Stack Overflow itself provided that feature. The only way to do that, since Stack Overflow has no API, was to screen scrape.
The obvious case is when a webservice doesn't offer reverse search. You can implement that reverse search over the same data set, but it requires scraping the entire dataset.
This may be fair use if the reverse search also requires significant pre-processing, e.g. because you need to support partial matching. The data source may not have the technical skills or computing resources to provide the reverse search option.
I use screen scraping daily, I run some eCommerce sites and have screen-scraping scripts running daily to gather product lists automatically from my suppliers wholesale sites. This allows me to have upto date information on all the products available to me from several suppliers and allows me to flag non-economical margins due to price changes.
I'm about to get finished developing a windows application which I want to release as shareware. It was developed in C# and will be running on .Net 3.5+ machines.
To use it the user will have to be online.
My intent is to let the user try it for 30 days and then limit its functionality until a registration is purchased.
The installer will be made available via an msi file.
Could anyone give the general steps on how to implement this?
Here are some more specific questions:
Since I am trying to avoid having to invest a lot upfront in order to establish an e-commerce site, I was thinking of a way to just let the user pay somehow, while supplying his email in which he then receives the unlock key.
I found some solutions out there like listed here:
Registration services
I am still not sure, if they are the way to go.
One of my main concerns is to prevent the reuse if a given serial, e.g. if two users run the program with the same serial at the same time, this serial should disabled or some other measure be taken.
Another point is, that my software could potentially be just copied from one computer to the other without using an installer, so to just protect the installer itself will not be sufficient.
Maybe someone who already went though this process can give me some pointers, like the general steps involved (like 1. Get domain, 2. Get certain kind of webhost ....) and address some of the issues I mentioned above.
I'm thankful for any help people can give me.
I don't have a useful answer for you, but I did have a couple observations I wanted to share that were too large to fit in a comment. Hopefully someone else with more technical expertise can fill in the details.
One of my main concerns is to prevent the reuse if a given serial, e.g. if two users run the program with the same serial at the same time, this serial should disabled or some other measure be taken.
To ensure that two people aren't using the same serial number, your program will have to "phone home." A lot of software does this at installation time, by transmitting the serial number back to you during the installation process. If you want to do it in real time, your application will have to periodically connect to your server and say "this serial number is in use."
This is not terribly user friendly. Any time that the serial number check is performed, the user must be connected to the Internet, and must have their firewall configured to allow it. It also means that you must commit to maintaining the server side of things (domain name, server architecture) unchanged forever. If your server goes down, or you lose the domain, your software will become inoperative.
Of course, if a connection to your service specifically (rather than the Internet in general) is essential to the product's operation, then it becomes a lot easier and more user friendly.
Another point is, that my software could potentially be just copied from one computer to the other without using an installer, so to just protect the installer itself will not be sufficient.
There are two vectors of attack here. One is hiding a piece of information somewhere on the user's system. This is not terribly robust. The other is to check and encode the user's hardware configuration and encode that data somewhere. If the user changes their hardware, force the product to reactivate itself (this is what Windows and SecuROM do).
As you implement this, please remember that it is literally impossible to prevent illegal copying of software. As a (presumably) small software developer, you need to balance the difficulty to crack your software against the negative effects your DRM imposes on your users. I personally would be extremely hesitant to use software with the checks that you've described in place. Some people are more forgiving than I am. Some people are less so.
The energy and effort to prevent hacks from breaking your code is very time consuming. You'd be better served by focusing on distribution and sales.
My first entry into shareware was 1990. Back then the phrase was S=R which stood for Shareware equals Registered. A lot has changed since then. The web is full of static and you have to figure out how to get heard above the static.
Here's somethings I've learned
Don't fall in love with your software. Someone will always think it should work differently. Don't try and convert them to your way of thinking instead listen and build a list of enhancements for the next release.
Learn how to sell or pay someone to help you sell your stuff
Digital River owns most of the registration companies out there
Create free loss leaders that direct traffic back to you
Find a niche that is has gone unmet and fill it
Prevent copying: base the key on the customer's NIC MAC. Most users will not go to the trouble of modifying their NIC MAC. Your app will have a dialog to create and send the key request, including their MAC.
The open issue is that many apps get cracked and posted to warez sites. Make this less likely by hiding the key validation code in multiple places in your app. Take care to treat honest users with respect, and be sure your key validation does not annoy them in any way.
Make it clear that the key they are buying is node locked.
And worry about market penetration. Get a larger installed base by providing a base product that has no strings attached.
cheers -- Rick
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This might be more of a serverfault.com question but a) it doesn't exist yet and b) I need more rep for when it does :~)
My employer has a few hundred servers (all *NIX) spread across several locations. As I suspect is common we don't really know how many servers we have: more than once I've been surprised to find a server that's been up for 5 years, apparently doing nothing but elevating the earth's temperature slightly. We have a number of databases that store bits of server information -- Puppet, Cobbler, Nagios, Cacti, our load balancers, DNS, various internal spreadsheets and so on but it's all very disparate, incomplete and overlapping. Maintaining this mess costs time and money.
So, I'd like to come up a single database which holds details of what each server is (hardware specs, role, etc) and replaces (or at least supplies data for) the databases mentioned above. The database and web interface are likely to be a Rails app as this is what I have most experience with. I'm more of a sysadmin than a coder.
Has this problem already been solved? I can't find any open source software that really fits the bill and I'm generally not too keen on bloaty, GUI vendor-supplied solutions.
How should I implement the device information collection bit? For instance, it'd be great to the database update device records when disks are added or removed, or when the server serial number changes because HP replace the board. This information comes from many different sources: dmidecode, command-line disk tools, SNMP against the server or its onboard lights-out card, and so on. I could expose all this through custom scripts and net-snmp, or I could run a local poller that reported the information back to the central DB (maybe via a RESTful interface or something). It must be easily extensible.
Have you done this? How? Tell me your experiences, discoveries, mistakes and recommendations!
This sounds like a great LDAP problem looking for a solution. LDAP is designed for this kind of thing: a catalog of items that is optimized for data searches and retrieval (but not necessarily writes). There are many LDAP servers to choose from (OpenLDAP, Sun's OpenDS, Microsoft Active Directory, just to name a few ...), and I've seen LDAP used to catalog servers before. LDAP is very standardized and a "database" of information that is usually searched or read, but not frequently updated, is the strong-suit of LDAP.
My team have been dumping all out systems in to RDF for a month or two now, we have the systems implementation people create the initial data in excel, which is then transformed to N3 (RDF) using Perl.
We view the data in Gruff (http://www.franz.com/downloads.lhtml) and keep the resulting RDF in Allegro (a triple store from the same guys that do Gruff)
It's incredibly simple and flexible - no schema means we simply augment the data on the fly and with a wide variety of RDF viewers and reasoning engines the presentation options are enless.
The best part for me? no coding, just create triples and throw them in the store then view them as graphs.
The collection of detailed machine information is a very frustrating problem (many vendors want to keep it this way). Even if you can spend a large amount of money, you probably will not find a simple solution to this problem. IBM and HP offer products that achieve what you are seeking, but they are very, very, expensive, and will leave a bad taste in your mouth once you realize that probably all you needed was 40-50% of the functionality they offer. You say that you need to monitor *Nix servers...most (if not all) unices support RFC 1514 (windows also supports this RFC as of windows 2000). The Host MIB support defined by RFC 1514 has its drawbacks however. Since it is SNMP based, it requires that SNMP be enabled on the machine, which is typically not the default for unix and windows machines. The reason for this is that SNMP was created before the entire world was using the Internet, and thus the old, crusty nature of its security is of concern. In many environs, this may not be acceptable for security reasons. However, if you are only dealing with machines behind the firewall, this might not be an issue (I suspect this is true in your case). Several years ago, I was working on a product that monitored hundreds of unix and windows machines. At the time, I did extensive research into the mechanics of how to acquire detailed information from each machine such as disk info, running processes, installed software, up-time, memory pressure, CPU and IO load (Including Network) without running a custom client on each machine. This info can be collected in a centralized fashion. As of three or four years ago, the RFC-1514 Host MIB spec was the only "standard" for acquiring detailed real-time machine info without resorting to OS-specific software. Sun and Microsoft announced a WebService based initiative many years ago to address some of this, but I suspect it never received any traction since I cannot at the moment even remember its marketing name.
I should mention that RFC 1514 is certainly no panacea. You are at the mercy of the OS-provided SNMP service, unless you have the luxury of deploying a custom info-collecting client to each machine. The RFC-1514 spec dictates that several parameters are optional, and if your target OS does not implement it, then you are back to custom code to provide the information.
I'm contemplating how to go about this myself, and I think this is one of the key pieces of infrastructure that not having around keeps us in the dark ages. Hopefully this will be a popular question on serverfault.com. :)
It's not just that you could install a single tool to collect this data, because that's not possible cheaply, but ideally you want everything from the hardware up to the applications on the network feeding into this thing.
I think the only approach that makes sense is a modular one. The range of devices and types of information is too disparate to come under a single tool. Also the collection of data needs to be as passive and asynchronous as possible - the reality of running infrastructure means that there will be interruptions and you can't rely on being able to get the data at all times.
I think the tools you've pointed out form something of an ecosystem that could work together - Cobbler can install from bare-metal and hand over to Puppet, which has support for generating Nagios configs, and storing configs in a database; for me only Cacti is a bit opaque in terms of programmatically inserting new devices, templates etc. but I know this is possible.
Ultimately you have to sit down and work out which pieces of information are important for the business you work for, and design a db schema around that. Then, work out how to get the information you need into the db, whether it's from Facter, Nagios, Cacti, or direct snmp calls.
Since you asked about collection of data, I think if you have quite disparate kit (Dell, HP etc.) then it makes sense to create a library to abstract away as much as possible the differences between them, so your scripts just make standard calls such as "checkdiskhealth". When you add new hardware you can add to the library rather than having to write a completely new script.
Sounds like a common problem that larger organizations would have. I know our (50 person company) sysadmin has a little access database of information about every server, license, and piece of hardware installed. He's very meticulous, but when it comes time to replace or repair hardware, he knows everything about it from his little db.
You and your organization could sponsor an open source project to get oyu what you need, and give back to the community so that additional features (that you may not need now) can be developed at no cost to you.
Maybe a simple web service? Just something that accepts a machine name or IP address. When the service gets input, it sticks it in a queue and kicks off a task to collect the data from the machine that notified it. The nature of the task (SNMP interrogation, remote call to a Perl script, whatever) could be stored as part of the machine information in the database. If the task fails, the machine ID stays in the queue and the machine is periodically re-polled until the information is collected. Of course, you also have to have some kind of monitor running on your servers to notice that something has changed and send the notification; hopefully this is easily accomplished with whatever server monitoring software you've already got in place.
There are some solutions from the big vendors for managing monstrous sets of machines - such as some of the Tivoli stuff from IBM. That is probably, however, overkill for mere hundreds of machines.
There are some free software server database solutions but I do not know if they provide hooks to update information automatically from the machines with dmidecode or SNMP. One I heard about (but no personal experience, sorry), is GLPI.
I believe you are looking for Zabbix. It's open source, easy to install and use.
I've installed for a client a few years ago, and if I remember right it has a client application that connects to the zabbix server to update it with the requested information.
I really recommend it: http://www.zabbix.com
Checkout Machdb Its an opensource solution to the problem you are describing.