System for a tool hire company- What language?

[Stevoicus]

I have a school project where i have to find a client and design some sort of program for them.

 

My client is a tool hire company that is currently fully paper based and needs a computer system.

 

The software needs to include-

• A simple GUI to input the customers data, the details of the machine that they are hiring and other details
• This detail will have information about how long they are hiring for so a notification system within it would be good (not vital)
• Source the pricing rates of the different machinery from a spreadsheet 
• Print a receipt for the customer

 

Any ideas on what would be the best language for my project? (Complexity is not really a problem as that is what i will be getting marks for)

[as96]

Since you need a GUI my suggestions are:

• C# with WPF
• C++ with Qt
• Java with JavaFX

[madknight3]

The best language is probably whatever you currently know best. That way you spend more time on development and testing of the project, and less on learning the language/libraries. You can probably pick any popular language and do what you want.

 

Some more options to add to as96's suggestions are

• Python with Kivy
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Electron
• A web app (lots of server side language options)

[Stevoicus]

Hi, thank you for your replies.

 

My teacher recommended using either Dreamweaver and PHP or Visual Basic and ASP.Net...

 

What do you guys think?

 

And my current programming experience lies with Python but i just dont think that will cut it 

[mathijs727]

21 minutes ago, Stevoicus said:

Hi, thank you for your replies.

 

My teacher recommended using either Dreamweaver and PHP or Visual Basic and ASP.Net...

 

What do you guys think?

 

And my current programming experience lies with Python but i just dont think that will cut it 

Php is a messy language. Visual basic is outdated.

But both of those techniques would use a web interface?

 

In that case you could just program your backend in Python (since that is what you're familiar with).

There are tons of web server frameworks to choose from.

You could then write the front-end with (html5+css3+) JavaScript with a MVC framework (literally millions available like Angular and React).

[madknight3]

13 minutes ago, Stevoicus said:

And my current programming experience lies with Python but i just dont think that will cut it 

I don't see why Python wouldn't cut it. Python can do quite a lot and has multiple GUI frameworks you can use for desktop apps.

30 minutes ago, Stevoicus said:

My teacher recommended using either Dreamweaver and PHP or Visual Basic and ASP.Net...

Sounds like he's suggesting you do a web app. Not sure if that's a requirement or not, but you can write web apps in Python too. Python has many web frameworks to choose from.

[Stevoicus]

My ideal method would be to have a form interface that is linked to a database to store the information of the active hires and customer information.

 

I do not really want a web application so i think i may ignore my teacher.

 

Would python be alright to create the link between the form/GUI and the database do you think?

[mathijs727]

10 minutes ago, Stevoicus said:

My ideal method would be to have a form interface that is linked to a database to store the information of the active hires and customer information.

 

I do not really want a web application so i think i may ignore my teacher.

 

Would python be alright to create the link between the form/GUI and the database do you think?

Python would do just fine.

There are cross platform GUI libraries available in Python.

I've personally used Qt (using PyQt4) which I would not recommend (meh documentation, most annoying GUI designer ever and the python bindings aren't complete).

But Im sure better alternatives are available as well.

 

Here's a list of alternatives:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming

[Stevoicus]

1 minute ago, mathijs727 said:

Python would do just fine.

There are cross platform GUI libraries available in Python.

I've personally used Qt (using PyQt4) which I would not recommend (meh documentation, most annoying GUI designer ever and the python bindings aren't complete).

But Im sure better alternatives are available as well.

Okay, thank you very much, i will look into some GUI platforms for python and take it from, i appreciate your help  

[vorticalbox]

personally I would just do a browser based system with a php/mysql backend. Php is really not that messy

[Nineshadow]

22 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

personally I would just do a browser based system with a php/mysql backend. Php is really not that messy

I'd use nodejs with an HTML GUI. Or you could simply make it a web page. Hey, why not both? You're also gonna need some other libraries, but NPM does have a very wide selection of packages.

 

nodejs ftw.

[vorticalbox]

33 minutes ago, Nineshadow said:

I'd use nodejs with an HTML GUI. Or you could simply make it a web page. Hey, why not both? You're also gonna need some other libraries, but NPM does have a very wide selection of packages.

 

nodejs ftw.

never actually uses nodeJS, I've started using angularJS which is very nice and I like it alot.

[straight_stewie]

On 6/30/2016 at 6:23 AM, Stevoicus said:

My teacher recommended using either Dreamweaver and PHP or Visual Basic and ASP.Net...

There's two approaches you can use here: A desktop application, or an intranet application.

If this software needs to be used by multiple users on separate computers (possibly concurrently), you will want to choose the intranet route. That will make it so that your user input forms and stuff can be a private website, and all the databases and stuff can be handled on a private "server". 

I personally would use C# and ASP.NET instead of VB. That said, both ASP.NET and PHP are commonly used for this type of thing, so neither would be "wrong". Pick whichever one you are most comfortable with.