I have a client who wants a tool for him to be able to upload his products, enter orders, and keep track of customer details. There are quite a few highly customised requests, which is why he wants the tool custum made.
He does not care much about the interface design – it just has to be usable and provide access to the databade. I’ve already designed the database.
I have no experience of desktop applications and usually write my web apps in PHP with the Yii framework. But hosting this on a server seems like overkill. I also have .net experience from a few years ago. What would be the best options for writing this as a desktop application?
6
Design a web application, and deploy it on his desktop by running apache and mysql locally. It’s actually a feature that this “local” web application will be accessible to his LAN too.
4
I say C#. It’s a perfectly good programming language, has a nice and easy RAD interface for form design, and is gonna be WAY more responsive then even a locally hosted web application. You also get the benefit for learning C#, which isn’t gonna hurt you.
I think you should build the application for the web, but host it on his machine. Everything from the code to the database. This does have it’s quirks, as the client has to do the maintenance.
I also suggest you talk to the client about the pros and cons of running it locally. It saves you from unnecessary headache.