database creation

lessing

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I am looking from some help from the very smart and well rounded people here on the forum. I have an excel spreadsheet that I use for work to keep track of my life. I do freelance worl and havespreadsheets to organise information for jobs and another to keep track of hours, billing and paid status, and several others to help organise equipmenet setup and settings. I would like to make a program that ties these all together in one place so you can start on a callendar page and add a job or go to an old one and see all the pages associated with that job.
My spreadsheets work fine for me, but many people I work with want a copy and having so many files is difficult for friends that did not write them themselves. There may even be a sellablilty of the final product which is what entices me to do this.
Ending up with a java based solution would be best for mac and pc users, but just pc would be fine as well.

Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Brian
 

Jumpmaster

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I think I may have misunderstood something here...it wouldn't be the first time.

Are you asking for someone to code or help you code this application (presumably gratis) so you can sell the end product later? I hope I misread that.

JM-99
 

Jumpmaster

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iNDiGLo said:
I do this kind of stuff full time if you're interested.
. . .
But its not gratis. :lolsign:

Yeah...I have friends that do too...that's why I was puzzled.

Maybe I just didn't get something...:thinking:

JM-99
 

lessing

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no, I am not looking for gratis work. Sorry, that came out all wrong. Before settling on a career in lighting, I was a debugging programmer for ethicon and then a network systems designer. Unfortunatly my programming experience includes pascal, c++, fortran, and authorware professional(now flash). I have done some dbase4 stuff but all of this was hard coding. I was looking for advice on a construction program to use to create this application. I am sure that I could crank out an interface in visual basic and a database in dbase4 or pascal, but that is niether modern or efficiant.

What do people use to create this type of stuff now? I was told to use filemaker pro. I looked at the site and am downloading the demo, but would like some advice froom others who do this type of work currently. If I stumble my way through a working sample, then I could find its economic viability and hire someone to either finish my work, or completly redo it.

If a "beta" had a good respomse within my circle in the industry, two other people and my self would pay for the programs completion. I don' think many people would want to do a percentage of the profits or company promise for the work, and we would not like to shell out a lot of money on the "prototype" so I would like to attempt it and see where we stand.

Brian
 

Jumpmaster

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Well. I don't know anyone that would agree to do anything like that. Sorry.

(Knowing my friends, it would cost you less for them to just code it from scratch than to have to work with someone else's code...and if they do that, it's going to be compiled and they would sell it themselves.)

JM-99
 

bjn70

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What about Microsoft's database program ("access"?). You might be able to combine excel, access, and even some visual basic.
 

Mike Painter

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Access will handle what you want unless you have some absolute need for a control not available for the product. It's programming language is essentially VB but since it is an RDBS system you would have to unlearn some things you would have to do in VB since it handles them for you.
dBase IV was an upgrade to III which was a port but not a rewrite of dBase II, an adequate program for CP/M.

Access is also event driven something you may not be familar with if you have a Pascal, dBase background. With rare exception this means faster with less code.

I've not looked at FM Pro in a couple of years but version five still showed it's origins as a program designed to handle what the name implies, single files. it has some nice features but early on you will run into walls that are very hard to get around. It is not actually an RDMS, has scripting rather than a full blown language and most important is still proccedural. That means you will be writing a *lot* more code.
Unless you are in the very small area where you need cross platform portability it is not worth the effort. If you sold to 8% of the PC market you would be ahead of selling to 100% of the mac market.

For just the Mac world, you are stuck with FM or 4D (Fourth Dimension) 4D "may" be more powerful and if you have a strong Pascal background you may like it. However it is pretty much a one man operation and some of his stuff is a bit quirky. Some things are very hard to do compared een with FM Pro. I think it's proccedural but may be wrong.

My Access based pharmacy program was used at the local university until the Peoplesoft group became involved. Two years after they switched they were still using my program for features not in the expensive product. The lab had another of my programs and flat refused to switch. They have been using it for almost ten years now.

One last thing that old time programers frequently have problems with ( and damned near cost me a big job)
Looping through code to find a set of records is a horrible way to find information. Learn to use SQL in code.
My small test database was taking five to twenty seconds to loop through a lot of information, and open a form with records based on the results, if any.
Two very complex SQL statements reduced this to less than a second most of the time and never more than less than two seconds.
 

shaman

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Just wanted to add my option and/or 2 cents worth...

1) VB.net/C# all compile into the same executable from my understanding so the efficentcy wars of old (VB vs. C/C++) are not the same. But just for the sake of discussion, C/C++ might still be a good choice due to the number of OSes that can use-compile-interpret C/C++ (with a compiler). Java would be a good one for portability but there is a lot of uncertainty there (you know the normal). C/C++ you can find a compiler for almost any OS.

2) And Visual front-end code done in VB.net/Delphi/C++/C#/Visual COBOL/Visual ADA/etc would be easily integrated into any database backend as long as you are using ODBC connectivity or the like. This way you could allow the customer to choose the database best suited for their needs (some may choose SAP others may choose access). This would also allow for a price break for the customer as well. **Note this would only be a problem if you would provide the support for both the DB backend for all promoted servers or just the default one included

3) Also for the sake of discussion, have you though about using a WWW type technology? ASP/Perl/PHP offer some pretty good functionality in terms of data entry, database connectivity, and information distrobution. PDF generation, charts and graphs, emailing, etc. Plus all a client would need is a web browser, no installation of client software. The client would simply have a intranet website (only accessible by the internal employees of the company) that could be hosted by a single dedicated server or integrated into an existing webserver.

Your only limited by your vision.

Sincerely,

Shaman
 
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