Project Data Manager was started in march 2005, and in the beginning it was intended to be an add-on for Zen Cart, a shopping cart system in PHP. At the beginning of the project I was just starting out in the world of programming and PHP, and the project has been my own programming training course, so to speak. Development has been periodically sporadic, due to interest and time.
I’ve dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy into this project, but will it ever become ready for a public release or will it forever remain only on my personal computer as a programming exercise?
The project goals have changed several times since the beginning and the code has gone through multiple refactorings whenever I learned something new and important. Some time during the fall -06, I wanted it to become more of a general purpose data handling tool, not only for Zen Cart but for almost any solution. Then in spring -07 I decided it should become more of an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool. At that time I also wanted to create a lightweight solution targeted at Zen Cart, and I almost completed it too! (Amazing, finally I -almost- had something to release!)
Then life got in the way. I got a girlfriend, moved in with her, got a new job, then we moved to another city and I got another new job. Since then I’ve lost interest in Zen Cart and have lately been looking at Magento, which in my opinion looks much, much better. Currently I’m in the middle of yet another code refactoring, this time applying the MVC pattern to my application using Zend Framework.
The reason behind the changing goals is simply that I have been following my own changing needs and desire to learn programming and PHP, instead of committing to a community need. The future of the project is currently still unclear, but hopefully there will be a Data Manager 1.0 eventually. Don’t hold your breath though, at this point I won’t guarantee anything. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Talend Open Studio, assuming of course that you’re in need of an ETL tool.
Tags: Data Manager, ETL, MVC, Zend Framework
How do I get hold of a copy of Data Manager ?
It’s still in development and hasn’t been released yet. I have been making much progress with it since this blog post, but since I don’t have very much time for it these days it will be a while until it will be available to the public.