One of Ben Franklin's favorite stories came from the time when he was a little boy of only seven years old. At this time, some of his uncles and older cousins, just returned from a successful trading voyage, filled his pockets with small coins. The young Ben Franklin set out on the road to seek some adventure with his newfound wealth; soon he saw another boy making music with a wonderful whistle, one of those hand-carved ones with a sliding rod inside a tube -- a slide whistle. Having never seen anything so fabulous before, Franklin rushed to the nearest dry-goods store, lay all of his coins on the counter, and breathlessly begged the proprietor to sell him a whistle before they were all gone. The shop keeper simply smiled, collected the coins, then reached down behind the counter and handed a whistle to the young boy.
Overjoyed with his purchase, Franklin enjoyed a happy afternoon tootling around the town, up hill and down dale and everywhere his little legs could carry him. At last it began to grow dark, however, and the young Franklin had to return home, whistling all the way. When he reached his family's home, he shared with his brothers and sisters and cousins the story of his great luck in being able to buy such a fine whistle. The older among them laughed at the poor boy and, wiping away tears of mirth, explained that he had paid many times the actual value of the plaything. Young Franklin's cheeks burned with embarassment and anger at his foolhardiness, and he vowed never again to give too much for his whistle.
The lesson learned by the seven-year-old Franklin served him well later in life, as he watched others waste their time and abandon their dignity pursuing goals that did not deserve such sacrifices. Ah, Franklin would say to himself, this one gives too much for his whistle.
In business today, it is easy to pay far too much for our whistles. We waste hundreds of hours of time and sacrifice our calm and good humor chasing after perfect reports and perfect presentations. We dig deeply into our in-house software or popular commercial software trying to get our data from one format to another, one platform to another, trying to produce something informative and visually interesting from vast piles of dry data. As there exist affordable, convenient, and effective programs to take all of the slow and frustrating work out of producing such reports, we simply give too much for our whistles.
In creating XML reports, we want software that is intuitive. We want something with a wizard interface, that can guide us competently through the steps in creating an XML report. We want to be able to design our own templates and report formats in our everyday business software programs, then pull the data from our documents into new XML reports or documents in a wide variety of formats. Any of our employees should be able to create an XML report with a minimum of hassle, and a minimum of wasted time. And the software for creating XML reports should work with various platforms, interfaces, and languages, including .NET, Java, C#, C++, Visual Basic, Python, and PHP. And, since we are all buying our whistles together inside of our company, we want to be able to coordinate workflow and scheduling when we produce XML reports.
Some time ago, three Greek-American academics put together an in-depth explanation of what end users want to do in querying their XML data, by way of reporting on a Web-based generator of XML reports (available at www.cse.buffalo.edu/~mpetropo/pubs/cn.pdf). While the software they explore is interesting, it is not nearly so user-friendly and efficient as more modern XML reports software, nor can it interface with the usual office suite of software products. Thus the article is terribly informative about whistles, but the exact whistle it describes is rather expensive. The nuts and bolts behind a much cheaper and more useful whistle can be found in blog entries like http://www.xml-reports.com/2011/03/xpath-introduction.html.
We all need useful, informative, visually impressive reports in our everyday business operations. And we would all like to give just the right price, in terms of time and hassle, for these XML reports. We would like any XML report-generating software to work with our existing office suite, and we would like to be able to create easily from XPath queries these wonderful XML reports. Don't lay all your coins on the table for your XML reports; get a dependable, user-friendly, and versatile reporting and document generation system instead, and spend your time on the things you really enjoy.
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