[Techtalk] cgi vs client-side scripts

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 20:47, Patricia Fraser wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> another off-the-wall question; gotta love this OS, such fun to play
> with!
>
> A friend and I are developing a GPL project together, with a MySQL back
> end, for live fish producers to do inventory, shipping, export
> documentation with (fish exporting is her background, but she loves
> tinkering with computers as well). We want it to be multi-platform, so
> we plan to use a browser front end and something in the middle in the
> way of scripts to talk to the database & do Stuff. It needs to run on
> Windoze because most of the folk in the industry will have that on
> their PCs, from the info we have.

Here is an off-the-wall response.

Have you considered using Python with wxPython (wxWindows wrapper) instead of 
a browser front end?  This would give you a 'normal' application with native 
look and feel on Mac and Windows and GTK look and feel on Linux.  This way 
you avoid both Apache and the potential multiple browser problem, while still 
getting cross-platform compatibility.

Python and wxPython are very easy to learn, but very powerful.  (If you 
download Boa and work through its tutorial, you can have your first 
cross-platform GUI application working in under half an hour, and only a few 
lines of code.  However, Boa does have some limitations - no sizers for 
example - and you should probably get the CVS version.)

See http://www.xminc.com/linux/wxpython.html for a good talk about why you 
might consider using Python and wxWindows, and some useful links.

Cheers,

Rasjid.