[Rets-dev] New Project Idea

[Troy Davisson]

I posted hoping for feedback and you've provided just that.  I don't want to
reinvent the wheel if someone's already done it so thank you for the links
to those projects.

With that said, I've looked at the VieleRETS package in the past (and again
just now) and it seems like it might be close to what I'm talking about but
I'm not totally sure yet.  It just seems like it could be done without using
a few hundred (or thousand....I haven't counted) files.  I like the GUI
interface and it looks like there's a command-line interface to it to run
the jobs which is good.

Using PHP was simply an idea of mine because of it's ease of use, plenty of
documentation and plenty of people online with knowledge of how to use it.
I've only been programming in PHP seriously for a few months but I've been
writing Perl for almost a decade.  A big concern of mine is ease of use and
ease of entry so people can go from 0 to 60 in little time at all.  To use a
method like I described would basically just leave the custom written
sections left to handle simple strings and arrays.  From there, it could be
as simple or complex as the programmer would want.

I'm already in too deep with my custom RETS client for the servers I pull
data from but have others tried VieleRETS for simple downloads and found it
to not do what you wanted it to?

I'd like to do something to help quicken the adoption of RETS so it becomes
standard even more than it already is and at a faster pace than it is.
Maybe I'll spend some time thinking of something else.

-Troy



On 4/26/07, Keith T. Garner <kgarner at crt.realtors.org> wrote:
>
> Troy Davisson wrote:
> [snip]
> > My experience thus far with RETS has mainly been with 1.5.  In an ideal
> > world, the layer 1 script would be compatible with various versions of
> > RETS and would always pass the data to layer 2 the same way.
> >
> > Does this sound like something that's already out there somewhere?
>
> Much of what you've mentioned is implemented in various parts in
> vieleRETS,
> written by Mark Lesswing.  Its mostly abstracted in the way you describe.
> Mark hasn't had as much time to code lately as he's wanted to in the past,
> but as with any CRT projects we're always open to
> patches/collaberation/etc.
>
> Check out http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/viele/
>
> > I've
> > seen other framework-like systems similar to this but they're either in
> > Java or C++ or some other very technical language and it's hard to see
> > or understand how something like that could be used for simple batch
> > downloads and processing.
>
> Well, Chris McKeever has been kicking around the idea a simple command
> line
> tool against libRETS (C++ or Ruby, Python, or the .NET languages) that
> took
> a simple config file and spit out a simple flat file.  A configuration GUI
> and/or app of some sort would need to be created.
>
> I don't think the language really makes a difference in the easy of use
> for
> downloading and batch processing for a finished tool.
>
> > Going with PHP would allow for easy
> > scheduling (using cron jobs or similar) and would be pretty easy to
> > understand and implement for programmers using it because of features
> > already built into PHP.
>
> Again, I dont' think this is anything specific about PHP that makes this
> any
> more or less possible.  You can cron just about anything.
>
> BTW, I'm not trying to poo-poo your idea, just the idea that PHP is the
> only/best language where this could work.
>
> Keith
>
>
> --
>   Keith T. Garner - Managing Director - Center for REALTOR(r) Technology
>    kgarner at realtors.org - 312-329-3294 - http://blog.realtors.org/crt
>
>
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