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

[Jeremy Bowers]

Jason Green wrote:
> 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!

What are you looking to gain for all of this effort?

I love FOSS and stuff, but unless you have some sort of real problem 
that can only be solved with such an extensive migration, this seems 
like a lot of pain for nothing.

With a better idea of what you're really looking for, better solutions 
may be proposed. While each solution proposed on the list so far is, in 
general, a good idea*, I'd point out to the best of my knowledge, none 
of them meet your criteria, as none of them have forms designers. The 
only form-designer based web development system I know of is .Net, which 
I have no experience with, and you'll note isn't open source. (I've 
generally heard good things about it, except that it's pretty typically 
Microsoft: Quirky, a little buggy, don't push it too hard to do things 
the designers didn't explicitly anticipate.)

Right now, "a nice pretty GUI for designing forms and making minor 
changes to add fields" and "web programming" are still pretty disconnected.

Unless you *need* to put this on the web, my suggestion would be Python 
+ pygtk + Glade, and create cross-platform traditional GUIs instead of 
web apps. Glade gives you the forms designer, Python gives you sweet, 
sweet programmability, and gtk gives all the Widgets you could ever want.

gtk & pygtk: http://www.pcpm.ucl.ac.be/~gustin/win32_ports/
Glade: http://glade.gnome.org/
        http://glade.gnome.org/screenshots.html
Python: http://www.python.org/
No matter what you do, try the tutorial anyways:
         http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/


*: Though I'd hesitate to bet a business on Ruby on Rails, which right 
now has hype far in excess of what it has actually proved itself on, 
which sets off my alarm bells. It might be that good, but I also see the 
possibility that a lot of the hype is coming from people who haven't 
done large scale web development before and don't realize that the 
reason it is easy is that it is somewhat limiting; I've seen some 
evidence to support this, but full disclosure, I have no direct 
experience. It's just that everybody's "why this is great" example is 
how easy it is to set up a new Rails site, not how easy it is to do this 
one thing that's really hard in other environments; again, alarm bells. 
My gut feeling is that if you're the only good programmer in the shop, 
y'all are going to be better off with Python, designed for readability, 
than Ruby, which isn't quite Perl but does tend to revel in its 
cleverness a bit.