Read Me

 Spiders v0.01 SQL - Perl/PHP Integrated DEvelopment Environment Reporting System
 Copyright (c) March, 2007 by Christopher Kois. 
 http://www.christopherkois.com
 All rights reserved.  You may distribute this package under the 
 terms of GNU General Public License (GPL). 

 Welcome to Spiders, a SQL reporting package for Apache.
 
 Spiders is intended to be a one-stop developer's package to generate
 and script SQL reports using the Perl programming language with a PHP
 front end.  Spiders utilizes psRpt, which uses many different Perl 
 modules available at CPAN.org and SourceForge.net in an attempt to 
 compile a suite of tools for the developer generating the reports.  
 
 To begin generating reports, you must first identify a few things:
 1.) Do you have Apache 2.0 installed?
 2.) Do you have PHP 5 and Perl v5.8 installed?
 3.) Do you have the appropriate PHP and Perl Apache libraries installed?
 4.) What type of SQL server are you using?
     - psRpt supports MS SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL servers.
 5.) You must have a valid SQL server username/password and you
     must know what database you need to access.
 6.) You must provide a valid SQL select statement.

 psRpt offers 6 different report format options.  These formats are
 Excel, CSV, XML, HTML, PDF, and TEX (Latex).  For v0.01 of Spiders,
 Excel is the only report format that is supported.  The Excel format
 is generated independently with it's own report format generator.

 I have made one sample report example available for you to get 
 acclimated with the functions that Spiders has available.  The sample
 report is in the reportScripts folder and is called SalesReport.pl.
 The client script is client.php and has the sample report name in it.  
 The client script redirects to the report.php web service and passes 
 the name of the script using REST.  The web service accesses the 
 appConfig.ini config file to get the variables of the report script.
 In the SalesReport example, the variables are accessed directly.  The
 sample script should help get you started.
 
 The best reason to use Spiders combined with the psRpt perl module is 
 "Your perl script is your report."  This allows you to customize the 
 report exactly to your needs.  By generating reports using perl scripts 
 instead of a GUI report generation tool, you have FULL control over how 
 you want your report to be presented.

 Remember to visit the Spiders website at http://spiders.sourceforge.net
 for the latest version and information.
 You can find more information on psRpt at http://psrpt.sourceforge.net 

 I hope you find Spiders useful.  This is the first release, so many of
 the features haven't been fully built and tested.  Good luck and have fun.