Commit 1c95c91d by Piotr Mitros

Comparisons to other systems, as per Cale's request

parent 9ba5399e
......@@ -24,6 +24,26 @@ to on-line batched analytics (e.g. for an instructor dashboard), to
on-line realtime analytics (e.g. for the system to react to an event
the analytics detects).
The model behind Insights is the app store model:
![App store](docs/app_store.png)
We provide a runtime. This runtime provides a fixed set of
technologies (Python, numpy, scipy, pylab, pandas, mongo, a cache,
etc.). If you restrict yourself to this set of analytics, anyone
running Insights can host your analytic. If you'd like to move outside
this set of tools, you can do that too, but then you may have to
host your own analytics server.
Comparison to other systems:
* Tincan is an SOA and a format for streaming analytics. Insights is
an API and runtime for handling those events. The two are very
complementary.
* Twitter Storm is a framework for sending events around. Insights is
an API and runtime which would benefit from moving to something like
storm.
* Hadoop is a distributed computation engine. For most learning
analytics, hadoop is overkill, but it could be embedded in an
analytics module if desired.
Examples
--------
......@@ -243,11 +263,14 @@ per-course/per-student. An instructor of that course might want to
have that fixed to the course (so it transforms into a per-student
analytic). djobject's transform_embed defines a DSL for restricting
permissions to analytics, as well as for fixing specific commandline
parameters.
parameters. This DSL should be cleaned up, but it's good enough for
now.
Multiple analytics servers can be merged into one djobject.
There is an issue of network reliability and timeouts when access
remotely. This is planned to be handled by being able to set timeouts
on djembed objects.
remotely. You can set timeouts on djembed objects to manage those
issues.
Shortcuts/invariants
--------------------
......@@ -316,8 +339,10 @@ Gotchas
* For events to flow in, a decorator in core.views must be
called. This must be iported from the main appliction.
* Number 1 bug: Python path issues if you have this installed and are
developing from source.
* Sometimes, the network transparency isn't quite right. This is a
bug.
* Are there still any Python path issues if you have this installed
and are developing from source?
Product Backlog
---------------
......
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