right tool for the job???

[snowgod]

Hey all:

One condition I got on a great deal on a car from my dad's friend, is that it comes with some tech support. While we were cleaning up his machine a bit (windows) he mentioned some software that he is interested in to write up title apps and some other in house forms. he isn't impressed with the idea of paying some sort of subscription fee and I was wondering what it would take to write this. We were thinking of having a database with all the pertinent info on a person, and then loading them into the appropriate form. One problem we have is to make sure that the forms line up with the real forms come printing time because the state is anal about that stuff. I have a little experience in C, VB, am learning perl and C++, and will do java in the fall, What is the best language out of those for this. I was thinking that at my experience level (I'm sorry for the following) that VB would probably be the easiest with an access database for this cause, also since he is in windows I wouldn't have to worry about porting it. I would like to maybe do it in C++, as this would push me to learn more faster.

what do you think???

[jcrowe]

I would probably use MySQL for the database on this one. As for the programming language you should concider python. I think it would give you to most return for your time. Plus this would allow your work to be used on linux as well as win32. Sounds like a good Sourceforge project. :)

[Stuka]

Having just done some database/C++ coding for work, I think you'd be far better off using Perl/DBI, or Python/MySQL for this. The DBI module for Perl will work w/Access, and that might be easiest for your "customer" to set up. Plus if he's already got it, you avoid the d/l time if that's an issue. Making it line up w/the form could be tough though....I can't help w/that!

[jemfinch]

Originally posted by Stuka:
I think you'd be far better off using Perl/DBI, or Python/MySQL for this


Just as a note, Python has several other database interfaces, including PostgreSQL, ODBC, and JDBC (which requires Jython)

(as a smaller, more personal note, I've done work with MySQL in both Python and Perl, and found things much cleaner in Python. Of course, given my .sig, I imagine that's no surprise :))

Jeremy

[lazy_cod3R]

well if you know java and u wanna program in windows why dont you try to write up an app in c-sharp.
It goes really well with access and if you have vb and access experience then this would be great for you to try, take a look at it if you like and i posted up some sample code for it before, it does access to an access db as well

u can get it at www.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~sbudiman/aip (http://www.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~sbudiman/aip)
its in the codereco.tar and the database is in the zip file, if you got, vb experience, java and access experience then this would be the right tool for you to use no doubt.