Application to query a database and send results as file via HTTPS

Question

I've currently got a tool which allows me to configure a database connection (using JDBC) and specify a set of queries to run against the database. This is scheduled to run at a specific time of day (using cron or windows scheduler currently). The tool then exports the results to a file (xml) and sends this file to my server via HTTPS. This tool is installed on customers computers so that I can get some data feeds from them for later processing.

I'd like to write a front-end to this that will make it easy for customers to set up the data extraction themselves. However I'm not really familiar with Rich Client front-end development (being a integration software developer) and was wondering whether there was an existing tool that would do all this, or if it was worth learning a bit of Swing say so I could knock up a front-end. Do any of you know of a suitable tool? (I'm looking for a one function kind of thing rather than a full data extraction and transformation suite which may scare off some customers)

Answer 1

If your tool already exists and is working, I think the best approach would be to just read a bit about GUI events programming (it's fairly easy once you get the grasp of it and have a nice GUI Builder) and wrap up a small GUI using a GUI Builder.

For Java I can recommend the Netbeans IDE and its GUI Builder.

The easiest path then would be for the GUI to just pass the received arguments to the existing tool, via Runtime.exec() or a similar approach.

Answer 2

In my opinion, it's quite easy and fast to make a decent UI via Swing. The Swing tutorial may be a good start.