Old desktop programmer wants to create S+S project

Question

I have an idea for a product that I want to be web-based. But because I live in a part of the world where the internet is not always available, there needs to be a client desktop component that is available for when the internet is down. Also, I have been a SQL programmer, a desktop application programmer using dBase, VB and Pascal, and I have created simple websites using HTML and website creation tools, such as Frontpage.

So from my research, I think I have the following options; PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python or .NET for the programming side. MySQL for the DB. And Apache, or possibly IIS, for the webserver.

I will probably start with a local ISP provider for the cloud servce. But then maybe move to something more "robust" and universal in the future, ie. Amazon, or Azure, or something along that line.

My question then is this. What would you recommend for something like this? I'm sure that I have not listed all of the possibilities, but the ones I have researched and thought of.

Thanks everyone, Craig

Answer 1

If you want a 'desktop component' that is available for you to do development on whenever your internet is out, you could really choose any of those technologies. You can always have a local server (like apache) running on your machine, as well as a local sql database, though if your database contains a large amount of data you may need to scale it down.

Ruby on Rails may be the easiest for you to get started with, though, since it comes packaged with WEBrick (a ruby library that provides HTTP services), and SQLite, a lightweight SQL database management system. Ruby on Rails is configured by default to use these.

Answer 2

The languages you list are all serverside components. The big question is whether you can sensibly build a thick client - effectively you could develop a multi-tier application where the webserver sits on the client and uses a webservice as a datafeed if/when its available but the solution is not very portable.

You could build a purely ajax driven website in javascript then deploy it to the client as signed javascripts on the local filesystem (they need to be signed to get around the restriction that javscripts can only connect back to the server where they served from normally).

Another approach would be to use Google Gears - but that would be a single browser solution.

C.

Answer 3

If you wan't to run a version of the server on desktops, your best options would be Python, Rails, or Java servlets, all of which can be easily packaged into small self contained servers with no dependencies.

My recommendation for the desktop would be HTML 5 local storage. The standard hasn't been finalized, but there is experimental support in Google Chrome. If you can force your users to use a specific browser version, you should be OK, until it is finalized.

I would recommend looking at Django and Rails before any other framework. They have different design philosophies, so one of them might be better suited for your application. Another framework to consider is Grails, which is essentially a clone of Rails in the groovy language.