MS Access 'equiv' for Linux 3288

Joe

The problem with the Borland Interbase product is that you have to install it with Jbuilder or Kylix or whatever. Most clients would want something small and simple for personal or small-dept tasks. My guess is that insalling the Borland stuff is a major nightmare (unless you can apt-get or rpm it.)

Another problem is cost. Borland stuff is not cheap and when you are looking at 150 desktops, you're talking real money... but that is not the biggie. I have not tried any of the Borland development packages (Jbuilder, Kylex, etc.) and their IDEs. With Access even an average user can take a clbutt or read a book and will be able to create a simple set of tables and a few simple forms and reports.

You'd be surprised at how much semi-mission critical stuff I see written in Access which front-ends a 'real' database like sQL-Server. This is especially true in small firms and small gov. agencies that don't have much in the way of an IT staff.

The product I'd like to see is a 'stack' that insalls Apache along with an IDE that has drag-drop event-oriented (via javascript) widgets for form creation (like Access) and a report writer (like Access) BUT which is scripted with (or generates) PHP code and HTML objects. Take away the PHP and this is what Visual Studio.Net is.

I've had a ton of experience with ASP.net and they really got that one right. It's a piece of cake to put up a simple inTRAnet (or local IIS) application. Why can't we do this in Linux? Maybe with Mono.... someday?

Al