[dundee] Database front end - any ideas?

[Barry Carr]

Hi Jen,

> Hi guys,
> 
> A bunch of us have a database project to do and I was wondering if 
> anyone had any ideas for what we could use as a front end?
> 
> We were thinking of maybe a having web interface. I believe the back end 
> has to be Oracle. Preferably cross platform (mixture of windows, linux 
> and OS X developers), and also if it requires an install it should be 
> something we can all get our hands on easily.

There's quite a lot to choose from. If you're set on a web front end then you might want to try 
Ruby-On-Rails. Free to download and deploy and its got quite good tool support Netbeans 6.0, (XP, 
Linux, OS X - runs on the JVM) and TextMate (OS X). Rails has excellent DB support but may struggle 
if you're expecting a lot of visitors to the site. Deploying a rails app can also be a bit of a pain 
too. There are also a couple of JVM alternatives, like Grails (Ruby on rails like framework for 
Groovy) and JRuby-On-Rails (Netbeans has direct support for this too).

If you want a desktop app then you can choose between Mono (although I'm not sure how good its DB 
support is) or the JVM. If you go for the latter then I wouldn't use Java but have a look at Groovy 
or Scala instead. Groovy and Scala should be able to use all Java libraries and frameworks that are 
currently available and both of these languages are waaay ahead of Java esp. Scala. If you use the 
JVM you might also want to take a look at Hibernate which is an Object-relational mapping framework.

There is loads more to choose from but the above should point you at the current mainstream.

Links:
Ruby:     http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Rails:    http://www.rubyonrails.org/
Groovy:   http://groovy.codehaus.org/
Grails:   http://grails.org/
Scala:    http://www.scala-lang.org/
Netbeans: http://www.netbeans.org/

Cheers
Barry