Re: Implementation Suggestions

On Mar 29, 2006, at 8:03 AM, Kenneth Downs wrote:

> Ian Harding wrote:
>
> I am fascinated by your post. I have never heard a bad thing said
> about RoR.
>
> I have been meaning to investigate it because it is the only system
> I've heard of that makes the same claim that I do, which is to have
> eliminated entire categories of labor through automation.
>
> Except that I built mine on a database foundation. Systematize and
> automate database handling and UI creation should follow. I did
> not know that RoR was so cavalier w/respect to the database, is
> that really true? Is it really just yet-another-UI system?

Pretty much, AFAICT, it's designed to run with anything that supports
SQL as it's
embedded store, rather than allowing you to talk to an RDBMS with an
existing
schema easily.

It's the exact opposite there of OpenACS, which puts tentacles deep
into the database,
and really relies on embedded functions and well crafted SQL. And
only supports
Oracle and PostgreSQL, not MySQL. I'm playing with Perl+Catalyst+DBIx
at the
moment, which seems to be a reasonable compromise, as long as you
really like
perl. :).

For the original poster - a web interface might well be the simplest
to put together,
but if a client turns out to be a better solution I'd strongly
suggest looking at Qt.
It has nice SQL support and it's very quick to turn around a simple
database
access application, if you've a passing acquaintance with C++. And
it'll compile
to Windows, Linux and OS X from the same source.

Cheers,
Steve