Point an MS Access / VB developer in the right direction...

[Ben C]

Hi there,

the choices you will have to make are between GUI toolkits are

1. wxWindows ( works fine )
2.Qt ( also works fine ... a little more polished than wxWindows though )

I have built client front ends quite succsesfully to PostgreSQL (nice DB but
don't run it under Cygwin ... it's a bitch ;) ... and MS SQL server ( I had
to do it for work ... so no flames please) using wxWindows on win32 Systems
and Linux ...

If you run Postgres ... there is a GUI tool which will do a similar job as a
M$ Acess front end ... pgAccess ... their is also a win32 admin utility
pgAdminII which you can use if you don't want to telnet into the server and
use the psql admin shell

I am currently working on an app using the embedded SQLite DB rather than
use Access and wxWindows  ... (though this will be the last wxWindows app I
plan to write) ... this might be a good starting point? SQLite will run on
windows and linux and can be easily accessed using the pySQLite module ...
SQLite is typless and doesn't have ODBC connectivity as far as I know??
(though someone might have written an ODBC driver for it) ... however if you
keep your statements similar to ANSI SQL statements (with type declarations)
you can suck in whole tables etc into Postgres later on without too much
mucking around ...

I am now looking to shunt across to Qt though as IMHO I feel that Qt is a
little more evolved and www.thekompany.com have finally got a release of
Blackadder  for Python 2.2 today ... woohay!

I hope that helps?

cheers

Ben C


"Dan" <abuse at federal.gov.au> wrote in message
news:3dcb9830$1 at duster.adelaide.on.net...
> Hi all.
>
> I've been an Access / VB developer for 5 years. I've run Linux at home
> for 3.5 years, and I think it's about time I learned how to program for
> Linux.
> To start with, I would like to re-write some simple Access database
> front-ends from work (which connect to a MySQL & SQL Server backend) in
> Python.
> Now I assume that I'm not going to find on open source IDE which allows
> me to set up a query and connect it to a grid to display on a form in
> 'datasheet' mode (please correct me if I'm wrong). So where do I start?
> Also I to choose a gui widget thingy set. I have looked at the
> boa-constructor IDE, which uses wxwindows. This would be nice in my case
> as it works on Win2k and Linux. Any thoughts on this? I am also
> considering buying Rekall from The Kompany. It seems to provide what I
> want, but it's commercial. It's not that I have a problem with using a
> commercial product, but if I have a reasonable open-source choice I'll
> take it.
> Maybe someone has a link to a HOW-TO on making a simple data-aware form?
> Any advice greatly appreciated.
>
> Dan
>