[ABE.pm] Generating report graphs

[John Cappiello]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 11:20:45AM -0500, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> Because I want to be able to send the report to anyone but I don't want
> to give anyone access to my database through my firewall.

Huh, ok, then yes, you could generate JSON, and pass that along as part of a
packge of code, that a person could work with offline.

> I don't know anything about JSON but are you suggesting something like:
> generate datasets in perl, then generate the JS/HTML code in perl, and
> send that large text document to the browser?

JSON is just JavaScriptObjectNotation.  

foo = {
  bar: new Array(),
  baz: '',
  counter: 2,
};

etc.

CPAN modules can automatically convert, say, an array of hashes, or anything
else, into that for you.  It's later eval'd by your JavaScript, and becomes
just another object you have access to.  Frequently it's used in things like
Ajax applications instead of the much beefier, and processor intensive XML.

Which reminds me, you could just generate XML instead of JSON if you feel
better about that. :)

If you have Dojo questions, the #dojo channel on freenode is pretty good, the
docs are a mess though.  Your best bet is to check out from SVN, and play
witht he demos and tests, and look at the source.  There's also this:
http://dojotoolkit.org/api/


-- 
jcap