[...] it seems that lots of news operations figure it’s not practical or feasible to hire a developer, and I think Caspio can encourage that line of thinking.

Indeed. Not only can Caspio encourage that line of thinking, it does: Casio’s home page says that Caspio is a “platform for creating and deploying web database applications fast and without programming.”

Look, folks: the future of news delivery is digital. You can either get with the program and hire people who know how to navigate this new world, or you can wring your hands while the rest of us eat your lunch.

I’ve actually stopped being all that concerned about Caspio: each new Caspio customer is one more competitor my paper doesn’t have to worry about.

Unfortunately, I was only one guy. And it was my only way to get data online. Admittedly, I didn’t deploy much live, but tinkered around with it quite a bit.

You can find a sample at http://www.newsok.com/dhswaivers …

I think Caspio has good and bad things. A couple good and bad:

Good:
1) You can quickly deploy data.
2) You can demonstrate to folks that online data deployment is a good thing. Especially if they’re hard headed.

Bad:
1) By its very nature as an out-of-the-box data app, you’re somewhat limited. I’m not a web developer, so I am fairly limited in the customization I can apply to Caspio. Every minute I spend tinkering with the app is less time I have to do journalism (of course, this would also apply to the positive side, as well).
2) If you later decide to go to your own web app design, you have to decide what to do with the already-deployed Caspio pages. Do you redesign them on your side, or keep the Caspio subscription?

I don’t understand Caspio’s angry attitude toward these discussions. It’s good for all of us to be talking about how to make our products better.

Thanks for that example – I can see where having Caspio handle the HTML tabling could come in handy, although there are other ways to do that as well (you could pull the data out of MySQL as XML and have a stylesheet transform it, for example).

But I think your last graf is the key, and that’s the situation newsrooms might find themselves in. Not only will it be unfortunate, but those newsrooms then might not be able to compete with other individuals or outlets with developers and better tools.

Derek

We use Caspio for some projects at my day-job at the Denver Post, and I was involved in the use of it once on a tight-deadline job. Here’s a quick run-down of what happened and why Caspio was useful in that context.

The U.S. Census had published a list of all the towns in Colorado and each town’s population. I wanted to publish that chart and make it sortable. I put the data into Caspio — but Caspio chugged when sorting through the few hundred towns that are in Colorado.

So I took the HTML that Caspio output, added Standardista’s client-side javascript table-sorting ( http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/standardista_table_sorting ), did a little cleanup on the fields / HTML and published the Caspio-hacked chart here: http://extras.denverpost.com/projects/2007/census/ .

It sorts fast, the results aren’t paginated (pagination didn’t seem appropriate for this dataset), and it’s visible to the search-engines. It took about three hours to do this.

On another note, it seems that lots of news operations figure it’s not practical or feasible to hire a developer, and I think Caspio can encourage that line of thinking. That’s unfortunate.

And please please please explain to me how a search engine indexing your data is a security risk. That’s a whopper of a statement that demands explanation.

Yes, my dear friend and colleague may be like a dog with a chew toy on this issue, but he is anything but a shill. Whatever the “industry” is noticing beyond Derek’s reasoned arguments is purely in their imagination.

To the points, it’s really hard to argue with you, except to say the cost you aren’t saving is, frankly, is the future of our industry. You can’t outsource that, no matter how complete Caspio’s feature set becomes.

Transitioning from news organizations with websites to, well, news organization websites isn’t something that happens on the cheap. It takes an investment. Right now, Caspio looks like a shortcut because most of us still don’t get it, but it’s not. I’ll spare you a longer rant on this subject… maybe I’ll post something about it on my own largely neglected blog.

At any rate, if the web is our future as we keep saying over and over, then that applies to all of us. That means we need to become (as Derek wrote in an earlier post) OF the web… So, while the Times, St. Pete and any number of other news organizations have started to make that transition, the industry as a whole has not. That will change. It has to. Perhaps there will be time for those second- and third-movers to reverse course. Perhaps selection will take its course, and those organizations that have given lip service to the idea of transitioning to the web will simply go away.

That’s the real cost.

School Guide

The most visually interesting part is under the Federal Ratings tab once you get to a school. If you click on the “full district” link from that tab, you’ll get our colorful “No Child Left Behind” chart.

For testing purposes, you can enter “Grant High” in the Quick Search bar.

And you can request Web Services to be turned on from Caspio’s support page.

And I will agree that not a single framework is going to be the get-all for everybody. I’d probably buy your argument on Ruby except its developers consistently fail to realize that the libraries are more important than the language. Ruby is making the same mistake folks made with Python and Perl and that is the inconsistent naming conventions and that the libraries are generally 90 percent and never get completed. But hey, that’s my opinion!

No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not, however, a big fan of the “well, X number of companies use this, so it must be a good product” argument. A product should be evaluated on its merits, and while Caspio has some in my opinion, it has its drawbacks as well.

I’m not sure where you get that I’m intimidated by Caspio. Just as you have a right to choose whatever product you like and comment on its advantages or drawbacks, I have the same right. Dark statements about the industry noticing things are a little silly, imho, and are closer to intimidation than anything I’ve been saying.

Any careful reading of this site would leave the reader knowing that I used Django when I worked at the Post, and continue to use it personally. Now that I’m at the NY Times, I’m using Rails. So it’s not about one framework over another. It’s about features and limitations in general.

As for using Caspio’s Web Services, it is my understanding that the trial does not permit turning them on. I looked throughout the trial and could not find them, so I had no way to evaluate them. But, taking you at your word, if you programmers can do “any darn thing they want,” why have I never seen Caspio apps with even RSS feeds? I also have yet to see a Flash app that is powered by Caspio XML – if there are some, great, but Caspio’s own forums say that this isn’t possible. The proof is in the apps.

I don’t understand your reasoning about search engine indexing. You are willing to post a database online but to have that database indexed would pose a security problem? I don’t follow that. If any portion of the database contains information that you don’t want to post, you can just choose not to post it. Otherwise, I’d want search engines to index the heck out of any app I did.

On price, I’ve already said that Caspio can be a short-term bargain. My definition of cost includes the cost of not being able to do everything that I want to do.

Finally, I’m glad that Caspio works for you, and I’d love to see some of your apps. Honestly – if you think it’s the best product out there, great. I’ve tried others, and I don’t agree. Now, can we get past the “why do you hate America Caspio so much” stuff?