I mentioned the Django app I made in the previous post so I thought I would provide some info about what it is. Essentially the goal was to reduce duplicate work everywhere possible be moving data from spreadsheets and other database’s into one central database. Also to allow a non skilled worker to edit this data, then allow for reporting to remake all the excel sheets that were originally needed. Here’s my setup
Ubuntu 9.04 server running Django, MySQL, and Apache (LAMD?) Data models are defined in Django which automatically makes an Admin interface with some customization options.
Django also makes short work of authentication with is done against Active Directory. Reporting is done with PyExcelerator and pyRTF to make downloadable excel and rtf documents.
It’s a pretty basic database but it really saves a lot of time compared to maintaining lots of xls documents and mail merges. Also it allows a technical worker to import exported data from other database into MySQL. Ideally this program could also be linked with other MySQL backend programs. So say I want to use SugarCRM I could symlink the contacts table so both Sugar and Django use the same one for perfect 2-way syncing. The real beauty of this is that it was so quick to develop. This is just been a side project for me. Doing it in PHP or .NET would have easily taken 3 times as long.
Technology Against You 