DrupalCon DC: Busines Analytics with Views
by Irakli Nadareishvili on Mar 05, 2009
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A presentation about integrating Views and Charting seemlessly in Drupal, presented at DrupalCon DC 2009
A presentation about integrating Views and Charting seemlessly in Drupal, presented at DrupalCon DC 2009
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Voot Vootinunt
So we work with a lot of data. We love doing it and we try to do it as much as possible. Another thing we love is Views. Raise your hands - how many of you know what Views is and use it regularly? So, most of you... Views is a web-based query-builder that is unique to Drupal. It is very powerful and allows to easily retrieve and skin data. Unfortunately, out-of-the-box it is best suited for the rendering of tabular data. At least, until today.
So, one problem that kept popping up, in our Drupal work was graphical visualization of data. People really wanted to see bar-charts, pie-charts and other cool charts of their data. And traditionally you manually write SQL and put it in a custom module and it kinda works. Except you lose the power of Views and we felt it was a shame.
But the question that people kept asking was - “is it even possible?” While the idea sounded cool, people could not connect “business analytics” with PHP and Drupal.
Have you ever tried pitching PHP in a traditional corporate environment? Yeah, good luck.
But is PHP really inappropriate for “serious” stuff like Business Analytics? Let’s look at some facts.
Or
the way you can look at it is that these are four websites that are in top 10 most popular websites on the Internet, period! Which means some SERIOUS traffic that they are handling and some serious feature-set they implement. These websites ARE serios!
That is PHP.
And on the right you have a very short list of websites built with Drupal. Among them you see uber-high-traffic ones like MTV UK, FastCompany, my personal favorite: The Onion, Observer. The largest aid and relief organization in the world, United Nations World Food Program just switched to Drupal. And very importantly, since we are in DC, we have to mention first US government-run website recovery.gov that recently launched on an open-source platform and guess what - that platform is Drupal, leading the way for open-source Web software in the government (and hopefully getting us out of economic crisis?)
We do not claim to solve the entire problem of business analytics, but we want to start moving in this direction and we have some cool things to show you and we believe Drupal does have future in the arena, as well. Not only it has future, but we also try to do thing differently. We are not trying to write Jasper for Drupal. We use Views: a genuinely Drupal-way, we build on it and see where it leads us. It’s gonna be a long journey, but we hope it will be fun.
Long term: Drupal has bright future in Semantic web. There’s no reason why it should be limited to just SQL so maybe in some bright future we will be able to drive SPARQL queries with Views? And we will be able to chart Linked Data with views_charts? How cool would that be?
Thank you for coming and thank you for your support. These modules would not be released so quickly if we did not feel interest from you and everybody else who has voted for the session and kept leaving comments on drupal.org, twitter etc.
Thank you