Re: Recomended front ends?

On 8/8/19 9:55 AM, Stuart McGraw wrote:
> On 8/7/19 2:38 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
>> On Wed, 7 Aug 2019, Igor Korot wrote:
>>
>>> On top of what already been said - make sure that the product you are
>>> about to start working on will have its requirements clear and concise.
>>
>> This is a critical process that needs to be developed in depth. One
>> criterion that will guide your choice of UI is whether the database 
>> will be
>> accessed only on the LAN or also remotely. For the former, consider using
>> Python3 + psycopg + SQLAlchemy. For the latter, consider a web-based
>> application using Django.
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> Rich
> 
> I would be a little cautious about Django.  Last time I checked,
> like many other web frameworks, it treats the database as just another
> component, one that provides data persistence for it, and consequently
> imposes its own constraints the schemas it will work with.  Specifically
> IIRC it insists that tables have a single-column primary keys.  If the
> client's existing database is already designed this way then that may
> not be a problem but if it has composite PKs then another option may
> be better.

Agreed the single-column PK is an annoyance, though it can be mitigated 
with unique_together.

The real annoyance is:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/models/fields/#primary-key
"The primary key field is read-only. If you change the value of the 
primary key on an existing object and then save it, a new object will be 
created alongside the old one."

That being said I use Django with managed set to False on models and 
Sqitch doing the schema changes with no problems. Also Postgres is the 
reference database for Django and has a contrib module with Postgres 
specific features:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/contrib/postgres/


> 
> Flask is another relatively easy to use framework, can be used with or
> without Sqlalchemy but doesn't have the wealth of addons available with
> Django and being simpler requires more work to build the end application.
> There are of course many other framework options (Bottle, Web2Py, etc)
> 
> Although it's been a decade plus since I worked with Microsoft products
> I had fairly good luck back then using Microsoft Access / VBA connected
> to a Postgresql backend via ODBC.  Even back then MS's frontend development
> tools were way more advanced and easy to use than anything available for
> free in the Linux world.  The downside was having to program in VBA but
> things may be much better these days with .NET et.al.
> 
> 


-- 
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com