On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 20:30, Antony Gelberg wrote: --snip-- > o Has a built in relational database, that can be linked to the GUI with > minimum effort. (Or optionally, uses ADO or DAO to connect to any number of > databases). There's nothing that will really have a built in RDB, but most of them can be accessed with very little effort. Perl and Java are both great for this. (From my personal experience. GTK and/or QT could be just as good, I've just never used them.) --snip-- > The systems are not massive (unless I land a great contract!). As a > back-end am I looking at postgresql? And the front end... I've thought > about Java / Swing, GTK, QT, even Perl/TK. Have I missed anything? Personally, I prefer mysql. Though I believe postgresql is GPL as well (I could be wrong) so that's still good. Personally, I'd suggest using Java. I've found that the RDB interfaces are quite good. And since Java is platform-agnostic (For the most part) you can support a wide customer base. My only real gripe with Java is that it's not GPL, so FSF folks and die-hard GPL supporters won't be able to run your programs. > Offhand I like the idea of Java - performance is not a major issue, and > hardware is bloody quick these days! I know GTK is generally favoured over > QT due to the GPL, but how do they compare otherwise? And is Perl/TK more > for small GUIs (that may do a lot behind the scenes)? Perl has a rather simple GUI interface for GTK, and the RDB interfaces are pretty robust as well. And by writing it in Perl, your program is THEORETICALLY able to run on any platform that has Perl and GTK. Though, in practice, it usually takes a bit of porting work. > Also, are there any free tools that are useful for this kind of development? > Especially with regard to GUI-building? If I have to code widgets, I'm just > not going to go there! Java has a number of GUI building tools available. Though I personally find straight swing to be quite simple. GTK has glade. I've never used it myself but I've heard good things. apt-cache show glade and/or apt-cache show glade-2. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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