Re: GTK or TCL/TK ... what do you prefer ? (beginner)

On Mon, 1 May 2000, Robert Wagner wrote:

> Unix don't have certain concepts like ODBC that we take for granted in a
> Windows networking environment.  Many Unix programmers simply use flat
> files for local storage, because database access is so slow, and there is
> the additional administrational overhead.... what a bother.   For some this
> is job security though, writing code that is tightly coupled to everybody
> elses code, and nobody else can understand.

Take a look at the Perl DBI module and then re-evaluate your above
statement.  And while Perl not always be bets the choice for all
applications, Perl supports both GTK AND the Tk widgets.  The user
interface is really a trivial point -- it's your backend where the most
important engineering takes place.  I personally tend to code for a 'model
view controller' environment, and separate data access from data
presentation from the ground up.

The Unix environment tends to be server-centric, not client or end-user
interface centric like the Windows environment is.  There *are* ODBC
drivers for all of the major Unix database systems, including Postgres and
MySQL, if you want to connect to Unix servers form, say, an Access
database or via Visual Basic.

> It would be great to be able to access an Access database from Unix, across
> a network.  Maybe this Spring I'll have time for a project like this.

This is really begging the question, but why would you want to do that?
It would be easier to use Access to connect to the Unix-based database. I
have done lots of projects using Access to connect to the server database
(mostly Postgres!).  I found that doing queries in Access through ODBC
was a horribly slow process, but using a pass-through query was blazingly
fast.  Access was not intended to be used for a backend for anything but
very small projects.  If you want something bigger, I'd use MS-SQL 7, or
PosgreSQL/MySQL/whatever off of a Unix-ish machine.

Brett W. McCoy
                                              http://www.chapelperilous.net
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