it's a lovely drive though .. esp through the vineyards .. drove to tri-cities a few weeks ago for a mini weekend vacation :) as to web programming - there are lots of ways to skin that cat.
sounds like you're familiar with access so probably somewhat familiar with relational databases. http://www.mysql.com/ or http://www.postgresql.org/ will work fine as an access replacement ( I prefer postgres over mysql though I've used both). There are probably UI tools floating around somewhere but your best bet is to probably get well versed in SQL. for web frameworks https://www.djangoproject.com/ is pretty well known in python land. some newer ones are http://www.pylonsproject.org/ and http://www.turbogears.org/. Since I do a lot of enterprise java work I prefer http://www.playframework.org/ these days for quick & dirty apps. there's always the LAMP stack but I don't care much for php in that stack. from your last comment regarding lugging around a laptop or encrypted thumb drives, you may want to look into setting up an account on http://box.com/ or https://www.dropbox.com/. If the data is too sensitive you could always setup a hosted linux box somewhere ( cloud or hosted) with an encrypted filesystem. You could even do automatic backups via rsync or other means to the hosted box from other disparate systems. -- Nimret Sandhu http://www.nimret.org On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Robert and Gail Hynes <[email protected]>wrote: > ** > Hi > > I would love to drop in on a meeting to ask some questions but the > Tri-Cities is a bit of a drive to Seattle. > > I'm looking for some guidance, opinion, direction, or pointers on how or > what to use to create a personal web application. I really don't know where > to start or the best direction to go. I'm not a programmer and I use mainly > MS Office and VBA/VB6 to create macros/tools to help me do my job. The data > I use comes from multiple sources - text files, spreadsheets, xml files, > and web sites - and is currently consolidated in Excel or Access depending > on the information source. I use VBA to massage the data and output > selected data into formatted text files for input to other stand alone > commercial software packages. The IT groups in the companies I work for > have made it extremely difficult to run these small Office Apps by either > blocking macros, prohibiting stand alone apps, or generally being a PITA > (protected share or net drive locations). I would love to be able to set up > an external site I can set up my l data tables, access from them anywhere, > and use my calculational tools so I don't have to constantly re-create > (read as re-type or re-enter) the input information, and generally protect > the data. I would love to start using more open source but have to admit > I'm getting too old for too many new tricks (I'm from the Fortran IV and > slide rule generation). Kind of getting tired carrying my laptop around and > using encyrpted thumbdrives to transfer data. > > Bob >
