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pedz

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I'm a device driver type writer and have not had much experience with GUI applications. I want to write an accounting system (primitive). I know about GNUCash but I'm not happy with it.

I was going to do a PostgrSQL DB driven by PHP so that I could use it anywhere on the web. So, any web client could be the client and most machines (PC's, Mac's, Unixes) could be the server as well since PostgreSQL and PHP are everywhere.

But, I'm worried about the GUI interface with PHP. Every time a user would click a check box, for example, it would need to go back to the server to refresh the screen. I could do a combination of PHP and Javascript.

I was wondering what other people would suggest. Either with or without the requirement that it be web based. Is something like Tk nice to work with? Or maybe Java's GUI stuff.

Thanks,
pedz
 
Why would a request need to go back to the server every time you clicked a checkbox? could you not just click checkboxes then have a 'submit changes' button?


It might be worth looking at using Java Webstart (or an Applet if you must) and Swing for the client, and using java servlets for communicating with the server/database.

Also, if you designed this well it would allow you to have two different front-ends/clients for the system:

1) A more sophisticated feature-rich Swing/Webstart GUI client
2) A more basic JSP/Servlet HTML based front end



But then as a Java developer, I would say that.
 
lnoelstorr said:
Why would a request need to go back to the server every time you clicked a checkbox? could you not just click checkboxes then have a 'submit changes' button?

Thanks for your ideas.

With a bank reconcile for example, there may be 100 check boxes. I assume there is some type of limit with the number of input values that you can have on a form -- maybe not.

As a user, I have not had good experiences with Java. It may be the platforms I run on (older AIX mostly) or it may be poor implementations. But they seem slow to load, slow to operate and extremely flacky. That seems to be improving with time.

But I'll look into Swing and Webstart.
 
So, can a java thing that you suck over the net do file system stuff like erase your disk?

Do most people have Java enabled in their preferences?
 
It can interact with the file system but since the Java VM doesn't have access to root's files no I wouldn't say it could erase the entire HD.

I dabbled in Java last year but since my experience is limited, I'll bow out of this thread...
 
pedz said:
So, can a java thing that you suck over the net do file system stuff like erase your disk?

Applets run in a sandbox and can't touch the underlying filesystem, unless they are signed applets and the user allows them to do so.

Webstart apps that will access the filesystem also need to be signed. A warning message pops up upon the first run and tells the user that the application needs to access the filesystem and whether the user will grant them access. Subsequent runs won't pop up this message.

Do most people have Java enabled in their preferences?

Depends on who you're targetting. All macs starting from Jaguar are definitely going to have a fairly uptodate version of Java (1.3.1+). Other platforms..... it varies.

On OS X, Java is really cool and doesn't have the problems often associated with other platforms (non-native look, slow,memory hog).

Check it out.
 
Thanks all.

I'm currently going through the Swing tutorial from the java.sun.com site. And I'll look at JSP. I also plan on learning PHP. A couple threads on the site really seem to encourage it.

I found it somehow funny that you can put HTML into a java label to get colors, etc.
 
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