Is there a modern day equivalent to Foxpro, Access, and so on?
I'm looking for a programming environment that has database access built in as one of its most fundamental features. Something where the table data can be very easily tied into the GUI without having to write loads of glue code.
Also preferably one that compiles down to an EXE for distribution rather than having to bundle the environment itself.
Any ideas? Thanks.
Sqlite is an excellent solution.
It has cross platform compliance. Adapters for .NET, Java, etc.
For front-end management of Sqlite databases, see here.
In the spirit of "black is the new black", I'm going to suggest Access. It's still around, and it still does exactly what you need.
I think you will find that most people consider that the "all-in-one" options cannot, by definition, be "modern". That's because they use file-server database engines rather than client-server ones (if they used client-server engines, the database and user front-end would, by necessity, be separate processes).
I spend most of my time using file-server databases and find that they work great for the companies I work with. But most people do not consider this kind of technology, which has limited scalability and is subject to file corruption problems if there are network issues, to be very up-to-date.
There are some development environments (my favorite is Delphi, but VS .NET is also in this category) which claim to provide the same development productivity that the all-in-one products do, but I don't find this to be the case. I would love to see a product that "binds" to different database backends and provide the kind of productivity you get from Access, for instance, but if it exists I haven't heard about it.
Access is still being developed and supported, and I believe there's a current version of FoxPro as well. I also spend a lot of time with a niche product, R:Base, which I find to be highly productive and to produce good-looking applications, but there are certainly trade-offs in terms of the programming language and access to the operating system.
I think that you can use Delphi for development tools, Firebird for the database a database and IBExpert for the IDE of the database