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    Monday, October 27, 2008

    J2EE Survey Software: Opinio

    A requirement came up recently wherein we need to be able to conduct online surveys. Thinking that this was an area where I'd best be served leveraging existing software, I started searching for Java based survey tools.

    I quickly found that there is a severe dearth of Java survey tools in the open source community. Most projects haven't been updated since 2005 and all of them seem cumbersome. If I am going to use something, I'm going to make sure it is easy to use and also looks good.

    So, abandoning open source for the moment, I started looking at what was available in the closed source world. I quickly found a piece of software that fit my needs perfectly. Called Opinio, it is a very nicely built J2EE application that can be deployed on anything from Tomcat to JBoss (even IIS, or so they claim).

    It has 3 versions: Lite, Corporate and Enterprise. The Lite version is free for use, but has a much reduced feature set. However, the reduction is in the analysis side and since we're going to be building our own analysis tools, this application fit perfectly!

    My only gripe so far is that it doesn't have a great community or a good set of docs. I'm currently trying to set it up so that it will write the surveys to our SQL Server database. There are directions on the site for setting up MySql and Oracle, but no SQL Server. Once I get the issue solved, though, I may post how to do it, here.

    1 comment:

    mala said...

    Wandering if your instruction for MSSQL will be published?