webpage building to incorporate SQL

[herodian]

hi all... a little help please..

A colleague of mine leaves today and as result I am taking over the management of the web pages we broadcast accross the offices which display things like the Call Centre stats, incentive results, user performance etc. The guy who is leaving does this manually with a combination of SQL queries and PHP (from what i can work out).

My question is... does anyone know of an app for OS X (my IT director said he would buy a Mac if this app is Mac only :) ) that will let me create web pages that source data from SQL / Oracle databases, excel tables, and then rotate the display of these pages every 30 seconds or so either direct from the box or via uploading to a webserver.

I'm no web designer and only just getting into SQL, so this needs to be very user friendly and quite heavily GUI based i.e no coding.

Any suggestions or am i living in a dream world? Obv, any software considered but OS X software pref as it means H gets his Mac for work :)

[Brad]

My question is... does anyone know of an app for OS X (my IT director said he would buy a Mac if this app is Mac only :) ) that will let me create web pages that source data from SQL / Oracle databases, excel tables, and then rotate the display of these pages every 30 seconds or so either direct from the box or via uploading to a webserver.

Well, if the guy was just using SQL and PHP as you mentioned before and you have access to the database from your local machine, it would be pretty easy to write a little script to create the HTML and send it to the web server every minute: PHP (command-line version) + rsync (for transfering) + cron (to make it happen on a schedule). cron only runs every minute, but if you need something more frequent than that, you could write a script that runs forever in a loop with a sleep command in the middle to make it pause for the number of seconds you need.

As for getting data out of Excel, you might be able to do that with AppleScript, either by getting the data directly from Excel or by telling Excel to export to a more easily readable CSV format. Although, I have no idea if or how well Excel is built for AppleScript support.

If you share more details about precisely how this workflow currently exists, we can probably come up with a more specific plan to follow.

I'm no web designer and only just getting into SQL, so this needs to be very user friendly and quite heavily GUI based i.e no coding.

Any suggestions or am i living in a dream world?
If that's the case, you're probably living in a dream world. :)

At the least, though, you should be doing this from a Linux or Mac OS X box. ;) I would hate to run something like this on a Windows machine, even though PHP and Oracle are supported and there are various automation tools, but that's just a personal bias.

[Yonzie]

Seems like a kludge-job to me. Using PHP is fair enough if you don't know any scripting languages better suited (I don't), but why in heck would anyone do such a thing manually?

In any case, the chances of you doing anything useful (beyong figuring out what he did to make it work) without learning a reasonable dose of PHP (or some other scripting language) is extremely small. I suggest you spend the money for the Mac on some consultant to make the damn thing work properly.