Dear J.T. -
Fowler, J.T. writes:
> This does not have to be fancy with lots of bells & whistles. In fact - the
> simpler the screen interface the better for the people who will be using
> this. I.E. text entry - tabular displays of valid entry values. Point and
> click would be nice but really is not required.
I'm a little confused by your thinking here. The typical thinking (to
which I also ascribe) is that you need better interfaces when your
users are less sophisticated. The web has been such a success because
it's intuitive.
> To pick your brain - given what I have written above - which of the tools
> you listed as having used - would be the simplest overall to use?
Although you were quite clear that you want the simplest I'm talking
more about what tools are the most productive.
Well, let's start with Xemacs. Xemacs is the most powerful text
editor that exists and I'm not prone to superlatives. In roles like
ours DBA, programmer, sys admin... you spend a large portion of your
time on the computer editing text. I've personally made the
investment to become familiar with this tool and am grateful that I
did. Achieving this comfort level with such a complex tool has taken
a lot of time and effort though and you should expect that. If you
already have a text editor that you find sufficient then you don't
need xemacs, but if it doesn't color code keywords or provide
auto-indentation then you should look long and hard at xemacs. There
are loads of books on emacs (usually the GNU flavor, xemacs has a more
complete GUI). I would start by going through the tutorial and then
browsing the *info* documentation.
Second pick a database. Oh yeah, you chose MySQL; good choice. Get
the Paul Dubois book.
Next, decide on the interface, web or not. It may be easier for you
to develop a text interface given your limited experience with html
but, you should probably bite the bullet here it's not that hard. If
you choose to do web you'll have to get and learn the Apache web
server fortunately this is really easy to use. It's a little dated
but I still use just the O'Reilly book "Apache, the definitive guide"
and on-line docs which come with the software. You can use IIS on NT
of course, but it costs money and isn't cross-platform. It is very
simple to use.
Finally you need to write programs. I prefer perl for several reasons
most important are that it there's an enormous collection of freely
available pre-existing libraries written by much better programmers
than me and it's enormously flexibly so I don't have to know more than
one language. I recently heard it referred to as the "swiss army
chainsaw" of programming languages. There are tons of good books. I
would start with two again published by O'Reilly they are "Learning
Perl" and "Programming Perl". Read the former and use the latter for
reference. If however you just want to develop a web application with
MySQL you may prefer PHP, it's easier to learn and use. You may want
to ask the more specific question of Perl vs. PHP of the MySQL list
which has a lot of PHP coders lurking.
You don't need UML, though it's quite interesting. Don't use java
it's too slow and immature. It doesn't even contain adequate
mechanisms for escaping text, good grief.
Yours - Billy
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