Greetings,
I am beginning the development of a fairly large database (100+
tables). The goal basically is to develop a GUI that is as close as
possible to 4D, Access or Filemaker. I am looking for suggestions on
the best way to design trhe GIU, both functionnaly and comestics stand
point. Suggestions are welcome, even if they are to systems not
designed in ROR. Thanks!
On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 18:57 -0700, Jacques wrote:
Greetings,
I am beginning the development of a fairly large database (100+
tables). The goal basically is to develop a GUI that is as close as
possible to 4D, Access or Filemaker. I am looking for suggestions on
the best way to design trhe GIU, both functionnaly and comestics stand
point. Suggestions are welcome, even if they are to systems not
designed in ROR. Thanks!
If you consider the web based interfaces of each of those above
applications, then ruby/rails is light years ahead.
If you consider the fat client that each one of those programs offers,
then you will always fall short since the nature of a web browser as
client simply cannot mimic the full control over the environment offered
by the fat client.
The most sophistication that you can achieve in rails is clearly ajax
and you should definitely buy Cody F.'s RJS online book ($10)
Craig
You could start with Streamlined (ROR plugin) and build on to it.
This may be heresy on a ROR mailing list, but you should also check out
Django. It gives you an admin interface for free (I personally use
Rails, but Django looks good too).
On 08 Sep 2006, at 03:57, Jacques wrote:
Greetings,
I am beginning the development of a fairly large database (100+
tables). The goal basically is to develop a GUI that is as close as
possible to 4D, Access or Filemaker. I am looking for suggestions on
the best way to design the GIU, both functionnaly and comestics stand
point. Suggestions are welcome, even if they are to systems not
designed in ROR. Thanks!
RoR or any other web development language for that matter can’t be
compared to Filemaker or 4D, both in terms of what’s being done for
you in terms of interface building and point-and-click (Filemaker) or
Pascal-like (4D) scripting. If your goal is to use a database such as
MySQL because of performance but don’t want to lose the lego-building
way that Filemaker offers, you could have a look at Servoy (http://
www.servoy.com/). Servoy is kind of like Filemaker 6, but then with
some features Filemaker is still lacking: event based actions (on
change of a field, do something) and decoupling of dropdownmenu
visual values (for example company names) and data entered in the
database (the id number of the company). It does lack some of the
features Filemaker 8.5 has, but if you’re a professional database
developer, Servoy will have more stuff that’s useful, Filemaker is
clearly aiming at the hobbyist and small business developers. Make
sure you have a look at the perfomance of Servoy on a Mac, because it
used to be very slow a few years ago (it’s a Java client).
If you’re looking at cutting the license cost because your software
becomes too expensive (Filemaker, Servoy and 4D don’t come cheap),
you should invest time in getting to know a programming language and
framework (because a good framework like RoR saves you years of time).
You could do an interface that resembles Filemaker (which doesn’t use
platform native controls anyway) using XHTML/CSS (although you could
probably get a designer to make you something that looks a lot better
than a Filemaker interface), but as said, you’d need to use ajax for
some of the features Filemaker offers. Especially the multi-user
updates (in Filemaker, as soon as one user updates a field, all users
immediately see it on their screen) would either require a periodical
update of (parts of) your page or a pushing system like Comet. Still,
having done Filemaker development for more than 5 years (very big CRM/
ERP database solutions), I can honestly tell you I’m frustrated by
both the speed and limitations of all these “RAD” database
environments. Ruby is such a beautiful language and Rails offers me
both the power and flexibility Filemaker/4D/Access/Servoy will never
offer.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
hi all
I have the impression that Jacques is looking for advice in how to
build a decent GIU to populate his tables on the database. Something
relatively easy to develop.