Database App?

V

Vyper

Awaiting Panther
Does anyone know of any good database apps for OS X that are as good or better than Access?
 
Filemaker has been pretty good to us. And since it's cross platform unlike Access it plays nice with most systems. We have used it for some pretty complicated databases with well over 100,000 items networked to over 50 computers and 5 different websites.
 
What are you looking to do? Something like Coldfusion or PHP with a mySQL backend is extremely powerful as well as completely customizable.

I'd say this would be worlds better than Access and very cross platform capable (as long as they have a modern web browser)
 
Why do they need a modern web browser? Everything is done on the server, all that the browser gets is plain HTML.
There are some applications out there which even allow you to put a nice Cocoa front end on the MySQL database. Failing that, you can always write your own with PHP.
 
If you are thinking about putting the database on the web (with more than a few people connecting to the db) then you will need to stay away from access for filemaker.
Both slow down considerabley with each person connected to then (via the web or network). I have worked with filemaker quite a bit in the past and am very glad that I don't have to use it in my new job.

Now, if all you are doing is storing some simple information then filemaker is fine.

For storage of complex data or a web accessable db, I would suggest either mysql or postgress. Both are free, very easy to set up and fairly user friendly. To display either of the db's on the web (or for internal web forms) i would suggest php. Also easy to set up and not very difficult to learn.

Good Luck.
 
Originally posted by dlloyd
Why do they need a modern web browser? Everything is done on the server, all that the browser gets is plain HTML.
There are some applications out there which even allow you to put a nice Cocoa front end on the MySQL database. Failing that, you can always write your own with PHP.
Click to expand...

By modern that's really all I meant... anything created within the past 5 or 6 years. My main purpose was that it's compatable with any OS as long as it supports TCP/IP and has a web browser, BeOS, OS/2, any Linux/Unix, DOS, Windows, Mac... you name it, it's supported :D

I created a web app for a customer and he was complaining that it didn't work. When researching the problem I found that he was trying to use Internet Explorer 2. No clue where he found it but he did. It actualy would not work whatsoever. the structure of HTML has slowly changed over the years. Try using an extremely old browser and see where it gets you sometime. I was extremely surprised.
I also use quite a bit of client side data validation using Java. To do this properly you'll more than likely have to have at least a 4.x browser.
 
Originally posted by podmate
To display either of the db's on the web (or for internal web forms) i would suggest php. Also easy to set up and not very difficult to learn.
Click to expand...

The ease of use for PHP is very subjective. If you've only worked with HTML and very little Java or C then PHP can be very cryptic at times. Setup of newer versions of PHP have been quite a bit easier than previous ones although I still don't feel that it's near the ease of setup or ease of template creation that Cold fusion has going for it. The only problem is that Cold fusion MX will run you roughly $1000.
(although I picked up my copy new in box of ebay for $600)
 
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