MisterPHP

What can you tell us about the team that built reportula.org?

The Team that made reportula.org is just one person. Pedro Oliveira, started Reportula when he needed a clean and fast web application that reported the Bacula Backups software of the company he works for. He has decided to open the project, and let it grow to full web application that is able to manage the Bacula Backups.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Reportula is a php based web program that provides you a summarized output of jobs that have already run. It obtains its information from the Bacula's database. Aside from a nice graphical display, it provides summaries of your jobs, as well as graphs of job usage. This is a fairly high level bacula management tool.

The main goals were to create a web reporting tool for the bacula backups system, as I got further into the project it developed into something more than that. Right know it calculates average of bacula backups, it has time line history of backups. Imagine this scenario for example, if you use the crontab feature of reportula, you can see in time by how much data your backups infrastructure is growing.

Example. in 2011.05.01 if backups infrastructure stores 500 Tera bytes, in 2011.12.30 it stores 510 terabytes. This is very handy for us because with this feature you can predict the storage needs of your backups for the future.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

I chose codeigniter because I needed an easy, fast, and supported PHP development framework. I found that with Codeigniter I could achieve that. This project was made in less than month.

Another nice thing about Codeigniter is that you don't have to "re-invent the wheel". Codeigniter has most of the thing that you need for an application already developed. All you have to do is connect the blocks which is very easy.

What is next on the plate for reportula.org? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

On the plate for Reportula is user registrations, acls, and managing Bacula Backups like "bconsole".

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

First of all i think that Codeigniter is one of the best frameworks on the internet. I've tried them all (Cake, Yii, Symfony, Zend) they are all too complicated, too big, with lots of features and slow. They all had one problem BIG, STEEP LEARNING CURVE.

Codeigniter has less features than the others but you start making an application in less than 30 minutes. And what it does it does well! Even if you think you need a big framework after starting with codeigniter it cames to you that you don't need another framework to develop some applications. The lessons I learned are don't re-invent the wheel, Codeigniter does it and does it well, the community are nice, and always had support on the forum.

Posté le 12/11/2011 sur codeigniter.com .