Overview
This page is very outdated and should be rewritten
Mod_Survey is a mod_perl module for Apache. It is used as a content-handler for "survey" files, or in other words for files containing questionnaires described in an XML-based tag notation defined in the Survey v3.0.0 DTD.
If the above sounds like greek to you (which, I guess, it will for all normal users who aren't from greece), here's a translated version: Mod_Survey is a generic program that allows you to reasonably easy write web-based questionnaires using a definition language looking quite a lot like the language you would use to write a normal home page.
(The above is copied from the user manual, which can be found in its entirety in the documentation section)
For a more down-to-earth idea about the purpose of the system, please look in the examples section.
Special note for ITM students: As spock was removed, there is currently no installation of mod_survey available on any of the login machines. However, if you need to use online surveys, contact me about an account on gathering.
Current state
Stable version: As of 3.0.x-stable, everything works in the intended way. The system has been pretty much stable since beta-2, and no major issues has been discovered.
Developmental version: As of 3.1.1, the developmental code is totally unusable. The parser does not crash, but that does not necessarily mean that it works good :-). The most interesting file in the release is probably the new DTD, which describes somewhere around 35 tags including long-awaited Memo tag, as well as several charts and tables. This release is only usable if you intend to participate in the development.
Features
Ok, so this is the section where I try to sound as a microsoft commercial. You should probably just test the system yourself instead of trusting the below, but there are a couple of points I find good with Mod_Survey. These are the features of the stable release:
- Open file format: The fact the the Mod_Survey markup language is XML-based makes it portable and easy to write new applications for. In theory, there is nothing stopping developers from making new applications utilizing the language, which would mean that the survey files could eventually be possible to use on a multitude of different platforms, not only web.
- Flexible: The Mod_Survey markup language have many configuration options, including but not limited to custom stylesheets, answer control and most of the common questionnaire question types.
- Powerful export formats: When data has been collected and it is time to use it, you would normally have trouble either with typing it in manually in the statistics program of preference, or have to bother with a lot of difficult conversions. Not so in Mod_survey. Mod_survey exports (among other) to native SPSS formats and to Excel and Access (via HTML tables).
- Decentralized: Mod_Survey is based on user-maintained "survey" files rather than a central collection of surveys in an inaccessible database. The decentralized structure of Mod_Survey lets the users handle their survey files in any way the want, ranging from hacking them with "vi" to generating them with scripts.
- Easy to use: Although it can be a bit tricky to write a survey file until you have learned the language, the use of the survey once it is ready is very easy. Downloading a SPSS export of the data is just a mouseclick away.
- Cheap: Mod_Survey is in itself free to use as it is published under GPL. Further, it presupposes free systems such as Apache, Perl and (as an example) Linux. It does not require you to buy expensive server software, and should be possible to run on pretty much any old workstation accepting linux and apache.
- Extensible: As the system is "Open-Source", it is possible to rebuild in any way you want. There is a CVS server available, so if you see something wrong, you could always fix it yourself.