Recommendations for RAD (web) application development..?

[Thomas Beckett]

On 5/5/06, Chanchao <custom at freenet.de> wrote:
> I've been researching development IDE's, Frameworks, toolkits that are
>
> * Free
> * Resulting application runs on Linux & Windows
> * Can use a variety of databases, esp. MySQL and SQL Server
> * VERY easy to use, very little coding, preferably drag & drop, fill in
> some properties, write the business logic, then run.
> * Optional: Web based. (But also interested in client-server
> environments)
>
> Obviously some kind of PHP Framework based setup came to mind, but
> there's MANY of them!!! It's impossible all of those will still be
> around a year or two from now.
>
> Most of them don't look very 'finished' yet.. Checked out lots of things
> from Ruby on Rails to a bunch of PHP + Ajax frameworks to Lazarus &
> FreePascal..
>
> My company sells one particular application that's currently in MS
> Access + MS SQL Server and the licensing issue remains a serious burden.
> We need to move away from this, but.... to what??  Its mostly for
> reasons of cost/licensing. MS Access (Office) is expensive!!
> (Technically it works really very reliably because of the SQL Server
> back-end en development/programming is a breeze.)
>
> One system that I was very impressed with was "Servoy", very, very nice
> and easy to code. It's however very very not free also. :)
>
> Cheers,
> Chanchao

You could always just switch to Open Office Base. No idea how good it
is or how quick, but its the neares to a direct replacement.

For web framework Id go for Ruby on Rails but thats just because I
like Ruby. There is the great RadRails for working on Rails stuff.
http://www.radrails.org
Ruby on Rails is definately a framework that is here to stay and it
already widely used. There are numerous good books coving the subject
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/097669400X for example) and
if you visit http://www.rubyonrails.org you can see a few sites that
already use it.

If you want cross platofrm client server programs then you can run any
gtk programs with a bit of effort on windows (look at gaim for windows
as an exaple) or you could make your client app in wxWidgets
(http://www.wxwidgets.org). The advantage of wx is that the program
will look native to whichever environment you run it in. There are
bindings for just about any programming language for both gtk or
wxwidgets

Tom