[ubuntu-za] Designing a GUI front end for PostgreSQL

Jonathan Hitchcock jonathan.hitchcock at gmail.com
Tue Jan 26 14:42:57 GMT 2010


Hi,

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 16:32, Ian Whitfield
<whitfield at federalsaints.net> wrote:
> Seen as I'm having trouble getting PostgreSQL up and running I decided
> to 'jump ahead' and look at the next steps in my "Journey"!!

That doesn't seem like the best idea, to be honest.  Doing the hard
stuff, because the easier stuff was giving too much trouble?

> I'm comfortable with setting-up my database (once I get it working) then
> the next step is to design a GUI front end
> (or form) to work with the Database. For this PHP has been suggested.

See the other recent threads on this list for a dozen reasons why PHP
is a very bad idea.

> So I got into various PHP tutorials and again I'm comfortable with this.
> Many aspects of it are close to programming languages I used years ago.
> However all the tutorials teach you about command line use only or Web
> based use.

PHP is a web-based language.  The name originally stood for "Hypertext
Preprocessor" (Hypertext as in HTML).  People do occasionally
shoe-horn it into other uses, such as command-line scripts, but this
is ugly and horrible.  It is best suited as a web-based script, and
writing a web-based frontend is the easiest way to get a GUI for your
database.  You let the browser do all the hard-work of rendering your
pages and being graphical, and you just take care of talking to the
database and outputting HTML.



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