I am using a commercial PHP web application that stores information in a mysql database, and find myself needing to create some custom reports on that database information, ideally presented via the web with the ability of exporting the reports to PDF or some external format as well.
I could just slap together some PHP to query the DB and then show the results of SQL queries against that DB, but was hoping there may be a more intelligent framework I could employ to generate these reports faster and easier now as well as in the future. Codeigniter looks like it may be a good starting point, but I’m not in love with it. What do people use when they need to work with an existing SQL db info but dont want to roll it all from scratch?
edit – I know php/python/ruby enough to operate, but I’m rusty so starting from scratch will make the process longer than it probably needs to be. I’m looking to leverage quality frameworks if they exist to give me the best results in the longrun
I would recommend Django, it has a management command that can help automatically generate models from an existing database,
inspectdb. You could leverage that to quickly get going and start using Django’s powerful ORM to build your reports.