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

[wayne]

Jonathan Hitchcock wrote:
> 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.
> 
Hi All

Wow, this has been a very interesting thread to follow, No really! For
me it's been Dejavu.
And if I can add if I may,this is one of our biggest mountains to climb.
Scene: Here we have a gentleman, who would simply have a DB with GUI
interface to insert data etc, etc.

And here we are, running the biggest and latest and greatest, DB's, Uber
Systems, etc, and we can't sort him out.

Jonathan is correct, we cannot expect people to pick up a PHP
book,howto, whatever and start coding.
Firstly, how are we going to get people to realise, Linux is a learning
curve, no short cuts here unfortunately, and one cannot start with the
"hard stuff" without at least having a clue if the server is actually
running or not.

As to pointing to Howto's, it great but I've yet to find a identical
one, and most importantly most newbies have not learned the power of
search, read and search and read some more.

OK, Enough thread high-jacking from me, Ian, *Please* persevere, you
will not be sorry, every one of us has been there,

I would install:
sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client phpmyadmin

this will install, everything including apache2 for web access, it'll
also ask for mysql passwd etc.

to access gui, goto 127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin in a browser.

For A simple page design app, google " phpmyedit" it has a very workable
interface, with reports printing etc. This will give you some idea on
how to roll your own.

BTW, Web enabled, means simply, your app runs via a web-server. with
access from your own machine locally or from a remote machine if your
webserver is configured to allow this.

Have fun!
Wayne A