[GLLUG] Best Web/Desktop Programming solution (...)

[Jason Green]

At the risk of starting a major flame war, I'm going to post this 
question just to get some outside perspectives...

The IT Department at my company (all 3 of us) is looking to slowly 
migrate away from our Access 2000 platform to something web-based and 
preferably F/OSS.  We've been happily using MySQL 4 as the backend for 
Access for about 2 1/2 years, and it's worked out quite well.  We have 
quite a lot of semi-advanced front-end applications built in Access at 
the moment, but we'd like to move away from that for various reasons.  
Currently, we haven't made use of any SQL Transaction capabilities, so 
data integrity is always suspect (though not too much - we do some 
periodic checking, etc.).  All of our applications will be centered 
around databases.

We obviously have a ton of options open to us, but there are a few 
caveats that we need to fill:
- Should have a desktop runtime as well as a web-based platform.
- Whatever we choose will need a nice pretty GUI for designing forms and 
making minor changes to add fields, etc.  I'm the only one in the 
department with semi-advanced programming skills, so I usually write the 
nitty gritty functions and the others can design the forms and update 
basic code.  (We've purchased Adobe GoLive 6.0 already, but haven't 
really used it, if that helps)
- The end result needs to work on IIS (yeah, I know...) and eventually 
Apache.
- Needs to be able to connect to MySQL, MSSQL, Pervasive v8, MDB (MS 
Access), and general ODBC.
- Needs to support Active Directory (LDAP) security as well as SSL.
- Needs to be FAST.  The users are used to Access applications which are 
very quick most of the time.  Most web-based apps have the tendency to 
be quite slow.  95% of all of our traffic will be internal intranet 
usage on T1's or faster, so Internet lag won't be the bottleneck.

Once we choose a solution, we'll be slowly migrating each of our 
applications from Access to the new system, which means a lot of code 
rewriting.   Rapid Application Deployment (regardless of it's buzzword 
status) is somewhat required, hence the GUI IDE requirement.  Some of 
our current forms are quite complex with multiple tabs, linked child 
forms, and a lot of Event-driven code.  I realize that we'll have to 
start coding very differently when going web-based, because a large 
chunk of the code should run at the server level. That's a big change 
for us, since all of our code currently runs at the application (Access) 
level.  Any resources or ideas to ease the migration pain are welcome.

Sorry for the essentially religious "What's the best tool for this 
[semi-vague] job" question, but I'm just looking to get some insights on 
what tools and environments everyone here has experience with.  We've 
begun looking at options, but not thoroughly yet.  Thanks in advance for 
any help!

Jason