quoting William Villanueva: > This may sound stupid but a friend was asking if its > possible to develop a program under VB and MS Access as > the db and upload/run them on a linux server website?
Ah yes... this is where business realities dictate a heterogenous approach to deployment . VB and MS Access are popular client development tools and as such you can't just expect people to drop them in favor of something else. On the other hand, an NT/2K server solution has a more or less justifiable reputation of being inferior to a Linux one. It is expensive and generally less secure/stable/scalable. There are many possible approaches depending on the exact needs of your friend: 1) It is possible to directly display the contents of the Access .mdb database to a web page via ODBC using PHP, Spyce, etc... However, because the Jet engine was never designed to be multi-user scalable, if you've got more than a couple of users accessing your website simultaneously, you're gonna face serious scalability issues (if not data corruption, etc...). It all depends on the kind of read and write access going on wrt the database. Also getting Linux to talk ODBC or ADO was pretty expensive last time I checked. What I wanted to do back then was display a .dbf (not .mdb) file on a web page and the only option was a $500 Easysoft ODBC-to-ODBC bridge so I junked it and used Apache Win32 (I've never had problems deploying a production site on Apache 1.x/NT 4 and expect Apache 2.x to be even better) instead. In your friend's situation, it might be possible to serve the Access database via Samba and thus avoid the ODBC-ODBC bridge. 2) Use a data pump to convert the contents of the Access database to MySQL or other web-friendly DBMS. Data pumping is synonymous to database conversion and as such may be a hassle if you have to do it frequently with only a few small updates each time. 3) You might be able to convert your VB app to work with a MySQL or Firebird database as these have ADO/OLEDB/ODBC drivers. After a lot of research and experience, my preferred approache is to use Delphi as the Windows hosted client development tool with Firebird and/or MySQL as the db backend. Access databases are the easiest to deploy in a Windows-only environment but will quickly show its limitations the moment you want to go on the web or go seriously multi-user. I can offer consulting/setup/programming services for your friend if he's interested. ======================= Email: andy/netfxph/com -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
