Hi Guys,
I know this thread is a little out dated, but I was wondering if anyone has been working on Richard Li's clickstream module? If so would you be able to tell me about your experiences. I am interested in any responses as I am a newbie to openacs, and am working on a clickstream data warehouse module for openacs. The following is a brief development plan of what I intend to do.
1. Port the aD clickstream module to OpenACS. Currently this would involve porting functions, procedures and queries to PostgreSQL. I am not sure if I'll need to hook the data model into the OACS object system.
The data warehouse creation process is hidden from the end user, and is probably best if I kept it like that. Should this process be fired off using the create-packagename.sql file?
The data warehouse data model is a standard star join. Theres the central fact table, and there are the many dimensions that the fact table references. I can't see why I would need OACS objects for this data model, as the data warehouse creation process is more of a service than an application. Is this distinction correct? That OACS objects are generally used for applications rather than services?
2. Create an interface to the clickstream data warehouse. For this step I believe I will have to look into using OACS objects. So that my application will inherit permissions, etc. This part of the project will be more transparent to a user, such as an administrator.
I too believe that there is no reason to include the clickstream data warehouse as an ACS module. In fact I think it should be an independent PostgreSQL application, as I am concerned that a large data warehouse could slow down the web server dramatically. However I would like to propose the idea of using OACS to develop a web interface to manage, as well as to extract information from the clickstream data warehouse. Does this idea sound feasible?
Any guidance or feedback will be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Nick.
