I need to implement yet another database website. Let's say roughly 5 tables, 25 columns, and (eventually) thousands to tens of thousands of rows. Easy data entry and maintenance are more important than presentation of the data to non-privileged users. It's a niche site, so performance is not a concern. We'll have no trouble finding somewhere to host it.
So: what's a good platform for this? Intituitively I feel that there ought to be some platform that allows this to be done with no code written - some web version of MS Access. Obviously I'm happy to code business rules, and special logic that distinguishes this from every other database app.
I've looked at Drupal (with Views) and it looks possible, but with quite a bit of effort. Will look at Al Fresco next. A CMS-y platform helps because then you can nicely integrate static content, you get nice styling, plugins, etc etc.
Really good data entry (tracking changes, logging, ability to roll back, mass imports...) would be great. If authorised users could do arbitrary SQL queries (yes, I know...) that would be a big bonus. Image management support a small bonus.
Django is what you are looking for. In fact, you could probably set up what you ask without much coding at all, just configuration.
Once complete, authorised users can add 'rows' with a nice but simple GUI, or, of course, you can batch import via database commands.
I'm a Python newbie, and I've already created 2 Django-based sites. I have created more than a dozen Drupal-based sites, and Django is easier and produces significantly faster sites.
Your need somewhat sits between two chairs : bespoke application and CMS-based. I'd advocate for the CMS approach, if and only if you feel the need for content structure customization will grow in the future, slowly removing the need for direct SQL queries.
I am biased since working with eZ Publish for many years now, but it satisfies the requirements you expressed natively :
Really good data entry (tracking changes, logging, ability to roll back, mass imports...)
[...] Image management support a small bonus.
An idea of the content edition feel can be watched here:
http://ez.no/Demos-Videos/eZ-Publish-Administration-Interface-Video-Tutorial
and you can download and test-drive eZ Publish Community Edition there : http://share.ez.no/latest
It is a PHP-based solution, strong professional community (http://share.ez.no), over 1100 add-ons available on http://projects.ez.no. The underlying libs are mostly relying on Apache Zeta Components, high-quality, robust set of PHP5 libraries.
Last note : the content model is abstracted, meaning you'd not have to create a new table everytime a new type of content should be stored : a simple content class definition from the administration interface, and the rest is taken care of, including the edition interface for the new content type. Might remove the need for hardcore SQL queries ?
Hope it helped,
Drupal can do most of what you need (I don't know of a module that will let you enter arbitrary SQL queries), but you will end up with some overhead of tables and modules you don't really need. It's up to you to decide if that's a problem or not. I don't think the overhead would hurt performance in your case.
The advantages of using Drupal would be the large community, the stability of the platform and the flexibility to add more functionality when needed. Also, the large user base ensures that most code has been tested rather well.
I highly recommend Drupal. It is very simple (also internally codebase is small and clean) it has dosens of possibilities and tremendous support. Once you start with Drupal you will never go to anything else.
Note that I'm not connected with Drupal staff, I've just created dosens of Drupas sites and many of them in just a minutes. My last one took me 2 hrs, see it here http://iPadDevZone.com
UPDATE #1:
It really depends on your DB schema complexity. The best case is that you just use CCK module (part of core now) and create your node type. Node is Drupal name for content. All you do is just web admin your node type fields (text, image, numbers, dates, custom, etc). Then, if user creates content with this node type he/she can enter all the fields which are stored in separate db table fields. This is however hidden for you - if you wish not to know about it - it is just a web gui. Then you choose how the node is presented, which properties as shown and where.
Watch videos in CCK resources section in the bottom of this page: http://drupal.org/project/cck
If you need to do some programming then it is also very easy to use so called PHP code sniplets which are entered as part of your content (node) and executed when the page is displayed.
Drupal has node revisions built in the core. You can see all the versions and roll back if you wish.
You can set the permissions in quite granular level so you can control what your users may or may not.
I would take a look at Symphony. I havn't been using it myself, but it seems like it's really easy to use and to customize!
http://symphony-cms.com/
Seems to me an online database system would be better than a CMS system.
So in addition to what's been posted above:
www.quickbase.com (by Intuit) - think around $150/mo
www.rollbase.com - check on price, full featured
www.rhythmdata.com - easy to set up, but don't think it's got the advanced features you're looking for.
Good luck!
B
I appreciate these answers, but most of them are really platforms that are much better at something else (eg, Drupal really is a CMS, and has some support for custom fields - but it's not at all easy). Since this is a brand new site from scratch, it doesn't really make sense to start with something that does custom database fields as an afterthought, I think.
The closest I've found is Zoho Creator. It really is like "MS Access for Web 2.0" - and even supports importing from Access. The pricing could get expensive though. It feels like it might eventually be quite constraining. I'm still evaluating.
Are there any other products like Zoho Creator?
Related
Is it tedious to migrate an existing website to DNN? Will starting from scratch be a better idea?
I migrated a 150 page website last year and it was not tedious.
We sat down with DNN, planed out the structure we wanted and build the menu's - 1 hour
Then we opened Notepad, and spent three days copying and pasting. Copy from Live Site, paste to notepad, and CTRL +A and CTRL + C, flick over to DNN and paste again. Any complex or arkward pages my colleague left for later. After three days we had migrated the entire site. No tools, no fancy import and export.
All done in a couple of days. And of course by the end of it, my colleague was up to speed on DNN also.
It is a low tech, highly successful and easy approach.
I would consider import routines for highly structured data, but otherwise, I recommend this approach.
You'll essentially need to recreate the site, and yes it will be tedious. Once you have some of the structure in place, you'd need to recreate the pages, assuming they are simple content pages.
However, if you have a typical data-driven .NET application with a lot of server-side code and data access, you'll have to redesign a lot of it to fit into DNN.
Regardless, if you want to maintain your existing user list, you'll probably have to write a new DNN membership provider to interact with that list. If you were using the default ASP.NET membership tables already, this should essentially be done for you, because that is what DNN uses internally by default to, although it does wrap it with it's own membership provider interace, because their users have to pretend be to portal-specific (even though they really are not).
Hopefully a lot of your code is in user controls and classes. If so, you can probably wrap them in DNN containers. It will be tedious and require a lot of bug fixes, but it's doable.
If your code is instead a bunch of spagetti spread out across a bunch of pages, you'll probably have to make a lot of changes to get them into DNN containers.
You'll have to decide what to do with your existing database. Will you merge it into the DNN database, or will you keep it seperate. The seperate idea is nice because it keeps the DNN presentation junk away from your core functionality, but bear in mind that your users/roles/permissions will also be in the DNN database, so you may lose that link to your legacy data.
Which leads to roles and permissions. DNN uses the standard ASP.NET role provider interface, but it's not really that simple. Even if you provide your own role provider to integrate with your own roles, you'll still need to persist the roles and user/role assignments to the DNN tables because it's not perfectly abstracted.
... and there are I'm sure a bunch of other things specific to your situation that I can't think of.
Anyhow, you'll probably end up somewhere in the middle. You won't find some magic migration utility that will port your stuff right over, but you probably won't have to re-write every line of code either. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, you'll probably need to do a lot of analysis, using some people with DNN expertise, to figure out a solid plan.
I would like to know what should be a good option to implement a system like that:
The system will be use by teachers in a school. They can login and see a list of the pupils that they have in the current class/subject. In this list they could mark the pupils that are not attending the class, and some other options...
The system should also give the option to parents to justify the absences of their childs.
The secretary can access to print some reports related.
This is more or less the system I would like to create.
As you see, doesn't look so complex, but I would like to have an idea about the tools I should use.
As I said before, this is not HOMEWORK, so I hope the next answers take this in consideration.
I'm developing this real system, but I'm confuse about what to use. I was thinking in mysql and php. So I would like to know, even if looks so easy for you, the steps to follow or the different alternatives that I should consider.
UPDATE:
I'm talking with my tutor, and we will go to the company that provides services with the servers, so I can ask them what we need. So normally I thinks the best is to ask for a phpmyadmin (cos we already have sql server). Should I ask sth else that I will need or will make it easier?
Greets
I would use a web front end, with a database containing tables for Classes (which contains the teacher), a table for students, a table hanging off that with details of classes the student takes, and a table for absence details.
You can then set it up so that when a teacher accesses the system they can see the classes they teach, then they select a class it will show the students who take that class. Clicking on a student's name will take you to page where you can enter the absence.
It's a fairly simple set up, but I've developed something similar and it works very well.
By and large there are no tools for developing a certain kind of application. Tools are graded by complexity of application, choice of OS / platform and what programming languages you know.
So if you are a Windows kind of guy you might choose to use SQL Server Express, VB.Net and maybe Visio. Whereas if you're a FOSS fan then perhaps MySQL, PHP and Dia would suit you better. (Of course many FOSS products - including the three I mention - are available in versions which run in Windows, so it is not necessarily clear cut).
This is part of your internship? If so, you ought to use something which is compatible with what your employers use.
edit
Okay, so your internship is with a school, and they don't do much in the way of IT. In that case, if your skillz are mad enough I would suggest you go for the LAMP stack, as it is cheaper.
I would be careful about looking to roll this out to parents. That will elevate your application to a whole new world of concerns: unauthorised access to citizens' private data is a big deal right now, so this will land you with a lot of complexities you do not want to have to handle. Build an app for the teachers only. Get that working. Then if you have time on your hands look at deploying it to a wider audience.
A simple GUI and MySQL Backend should suffice.
Create a List of pupils, put 4 buttons next to each pupil (there, missing, excused, late) and just store it in a database for each class.
Report generation isn't that hard either, just execute the necessary selects (something like: select pupil_id, count(*) from class where state='missing') whenever someone clicks the reports->[...] menu items.
Of course it greatly depends on which other specs exist, but since this sounds like homework i think this should suffice.
OK, so you'll need access from multiple clients, so web based would be ok. You'll need persistent data that is rather primitive. So you might use almost any persistence solution. A RDBMS would be the most common choice, but CouchDB or other BigTable'ish implementations would also suffice.
Other than that you're free in your choice. Java, PHP, Ruby, C++ use whatever you like. Mysql, postgres, couchdb, xml flatfile are all valid choices for persistence.
Without more informations it's not possible to pinpoint a set of technologies ;-)
I am going to be creating a work order system with three roles
The "client" - The client can request projects to be completed by the worker. The project must be selected from a list of templates and various sub options all referred to as a campaign (campaign types come and go throughout the year)
The worker - The worker must be able to view work orders and mark them as accepted/rejected, work in progress and completed.
The overlord - He/She needs to see stats concerning the activity of the other two types of users.
So.
This is a web app. But a very simple one in terms of logic. Could something like drupal handle this? Or would I have to write my own modules? The other out of the box aspects of drupal make it attractive (admin, user creation, news feeds, etc...)
I have looked at Views and Webforms. Views seems great for querying and displaying data from the work order database (great for a portion of all three roles), but I am not clear as to how I interface with my work order database when creating and modifying work orders.
Webforms doesn't see to be the answer, I am sure I just missing something right under my nose.
Any hints in which direction to look would be great!
Thanks.
If you use a simpler, less powerful CMS, you may save time with the learning curve but lose time struggling with a less flexible framework. Also: Check how active the developer community is when evaluating Open Source software. You'll need support.
Views and Webforms may be tools that you'll end up using but what you're really talking about is work flow. You could build your own work flow with a combination CCK and views, yes. There are also work flow modules.
Are you and IRC user? See: http://drupal.org/irc
I am pretty certain that you can do this with drupal. I would suggest looking into using an easier CMS than drupal for something simple like this. Using something like MediaWiki for this application might be quicker to develop and have less of a learning curve. If you don't mind putting in the time to learn drupal, I think you will ultimately have more freedom.
First of all, don't underestimate Drupal's learning curve. Especially if your PHP and/or programming skills are relatively new. Drupal does a lot of things in it's own way, and it's good to know that way.
Secondly, Drupal is (imho) made first of all for outward facing sites, it can have a lot of stuff just for the users and not for the public, but a lot of its functionality is made for the CMS part of the system. You might consider using a more framework-style system like Zend Framework, which components are a bit more "loose" but also offers less functionality out of the box.
Thirdly, depending on what a work order is and how it should be treated a custom module could be needed. If a workorder has a really simple datamodel, it could probably be done without programming, but if it is complex you'll have to fire up your favorite editor. Don't worry, making a module sounds scarier than it really is.
I don't know how good your knowledge of drupal is, but to me this has CCK and Views2 and user roles written all over it.
Basically, use CCK to create your content types (remember the user reference field might come in handy to assign a node/record to a particular user)
Then create views for each user group (they could be shared, as you can assign them to more than one role type)
Creating a view where you filter the cck user reference field by the user looking at the screen may also come in handy here.
OKAY, there might be a little bit more to it than that, but what you want is doable.
UPDATE: To protect your site from unwanted eyes, check out the site security module as it puts a security wrapper around all of your website.
Views - Create lists - allow access by user roles
CCK - Define your own content types (add your own fields)
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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.
I'm currently looking at the Python framework Django for future db-based web apps as well as for a port of some apps currently written in PHP. One of the nastier issues during my last years was keeping track of database schema changes and deploying these changes to productive systems. I haven't dared asking for being able to undo them too, but of course for testing and debugging that would be a great feature. From other questions here (such as this one or this one), I can see that I'm not alone and that this is not a trivial problem. Also, I found many inspirations in the answers there.
Now, as Django seems to be very powerful, does it have any tools to help with the above? Maybe it's even in their docs and I missed it?
There are at least two third party utilities to handle DB schema migrations, South and Django Evolution. I haven't tried either one, but I have heard some good things about South, though Evolution has been around a little longer.
Also, look at SchemaEvolution on the Django wiki. It is just a wiki page about migrating the db.
Last time I checked (version 0.97), syncdb will be able to add tables to sync your DB schema with your models.py file, but it cannot:
Rename or add a column on a populated DB. You need to do that by hand.
Refactorize your model (like split a table into two) and repopulate your DB accordingly.
It might be possible though to write a Django script to make the migration by playing with the two different managers, but that might take ages if your DB is large.
There was a panel session on DB schema changes at the recent DjangoCon; there is a video of the session (thanks to Google), which should provide some useful information on a number of these utilities.
And now there's also dmigrations. From announcement:
django-evolution attempts to address this problem the clever way, by detecting changes to models that are not yet reflected in the database schema and figuring out what needs to be done to bring the two back in sync. In contrast, dmigrations takes the stupid approach: it requires you to explicitly state the changes in a sequence of migrations, which will be applied in turn to bring a database up to the most recent state that reflects the underlying models.
This means extra work for developers who create migrations, but it also makes the whole process completely transparent—for our projects, we decided to go with the simplest system that could possibly work.
(My bold)
I heard lot of good about Django Schema Evolution Branch and those were opions of actual users. It mostely works out of the box and do what it should do.
U should lookup Dmigrations, it functions a little bit diffrent from django-eveoltions.
It shows you everything it is doing and for compliccated things it asks you for your intervetnions. It should be great.