[ILUG] [OT] Which programming language ?

[Gareth Eason]

	Hi,

	Please do call back again. Apart from the trolling, irrelevant replies, 
responding before reading what's been said previously in the thread, 
arbitrary and unnecessary zealotry, religiously guarded 'opinions' on 
operating systems, editors and languages, and numerous other faults and 
failings that seem inherent in any mailing list, we're mostly a nice 
and reasonably helpful bunch :-)

	I've had some excellent successes migrating people and businesses from 
Windows GUI type Client-Server applications to web-interface based 
applications - the disadvantages are often heavily outweighed by the 
flexibility of being able to run the application from anywhere, on any 
platform, with any browser. I've also found that when offering training, 
people seem to be more likely to say, "It's only a webpage - I don't 
need training on this." - which (in my experience) has been a good 
thing. It's almost like they don't notice that they've been migrated to 
a new system because they can treat it in exactly the same was as just 
another new website. This can save a huge amount of time (and money) on 
migration training etc.

	Upgrades mean 'upgrading' the system on the server and viola - everyone 
sees the new version when next they connect. Another (often) significant 
time and cost saving.

	Scaling and expansion is often as simple as upgrading the webserver 
hardware - and if that's not enough, seperate the database from the 
webserver and upgrade each. And if that's not enough, get more 
webservers and loadbalance across them. Again, significant cost savings 
can be had over upgrading all the office PCs that need to use the system.

	I'll not go into licensing, but you'll probably find significant cost 
savings there too - depending on what your server platform of choice is. 
Making a wild stab at the scale of your project, I can't see any reason 
as to why you can't put your server on a single Linux box running 
Apache, MySQL (or DB of choice) and PHP - and you can have as many 
clients connecting and using the system as you like - and it's free. 
(IANAL - you should get a lawyer to check all this before rolling it 
into production, or at least whoever is responsible for software 
licensing in your company.)

	Good luck with your project - and do drop in again :-)

	Best regards,
	-->Gar

	

Declan Grady wrote:
> David Dorgan wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 10:13 +0000, Declan Grady wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> Basically the program does a lot of simple calculations, lookups from 
>>> database tables (none of which are linked) and ends up creating 3 
>>> database tables as the output, which are printed and saved for later 
>>> use / modification / printing again.
>>> The user interface will have to run on doze clients, preferably a gui 
>>> of some sort.
>>>   
>>
>> Where there has been quite a few ideas put out on the list, but how
>> about a very simple web application? This means you aren't tied
>> to toolkit, or o/s.
>> You could use cgi, or jsp, php/mysql etc... It may save you a lot
>> of hassle in the long run. Plus debugging and development costs
>> are tiny.
>>
>> David
>>
>>  
>>
> I think the LAMP route seems to be the way to go. I do like the idea of 
> a server and not having to setup individual clients.
> 
> Seems I've started a bit of a battle on the list about linux v doze .. 
> etc etc .. Sorry.
> 
> TBH I use a doze desktop, (had so much trouble trying to get my dell 
> laptop screen configured in more than 640x480 in FC2 that I gave up, as 
> I didnt have the time to mess with it, and went back to doze), also 2 
> linux servers - one deadrat, and one debian.
> 
> Thank you to all who replied with suggestions. I'm sure I'll be back for 
> help when I hit some problems.
> 
> Cheers,
> Declan