Pointers towards developing a quick and dirty business app.

Question

Some people have approached me lately about creating a business app for them (I'm a computer tech student specializing in programming, with a bit of experience in systems and driver programming) and it does sound simple, but I don't really have much of an idea how or where to start.

It should be a small-ish app with a database backend. Basically keeping track of invoices, clients, products and the attached data.

Are there any APIs that would make creating such an application much faster and easier? Platform isn't really an issue. I have a Mac, a Windows PC, and I am somewhat well-versed in linux in general, and the client will move to a platform of my choice.

I know very little MySQL, I know Objective C, C and a few others, but building a database product this way seems like a very complicated endeavour considering that a large amount of the code I'll be writing has probably been written before and by better programmers than I.

EDIT : If possible, I would definitely like not having to play around with web frameworks. This is not to say I don't want to see them, it's just that I'm not used at all to the web development model.

Answer 1

I would suggest that you look into Ruby on Rails for soemthing like this. It will take care of a lot of the low level details of database access for you and because it is built around the Model-View-Controller paradigm, it will take away some of the architectural decision from you and make you focus on getting the app done. Using Ruby on Rails, I've built a couple of sites of smallish scale that sound like what you have done in no time at all.

Answer 2

For quick and dirty, I suggest Ruby on Rails (if you fancy a bit of Ruby), or Grails (if you fancy a bit of Java/Groovy, and is essentially the Java platform equivalent of RoR).