

Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access - palehose
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/dreaming-of-rails-as-the-next.html

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kylec
Wouldn't Django, with its automatic admin, be better for replacing Access than
Rails? The scaffolding in Rails is pretty bare-bones, but the Django admin
(IMHO) is good enough to be used as the actual app if the situation warrants.

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dasil003
Maybe a bit closer, but still a huge miss. Both Rails and Django are
frameworks for developers, whereas Access is more of a "prosumer" product for
clever office workers.

If the OA was so impressed with Access, maybe he should learn real
programming, because Rails and Django will never be as consumer-oriented as
Access. You could build an Access-like program on top of some of the guts, but
it would inevitably be just as dumbed-down and cumbersome as Access.

The vision is misguided.

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jeremymcanally
It's not that Rails culture makes GUI's the end product, it's that it's the
necessity of the product. It's a web framework, not a database GUI. You could
_build_ a database GUI in Rails easily enough, but you're still using a
database GUI that happens to run on a web framework.

The ignorance here (or at best, tenuous reasoning) is apalling. Jeez. You'd
think this guy has never used Rails or something.

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csbartus
Plot: The author tries to convince Rails is the web version of Access.

Very weak article, wondering how O'Reilly can afford this.

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flooha
"Microsoft Access had been my preferred tool for creating applications
centered on a relational database."

Here come the down mods, but anyone making that statement automatically loses
any credibility of tech savvy and generates an enormous amount of pity. If
access were all I could use, I would run scratch my eyes out.

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iigs
It beats abusing Excel to accomplish the same objectives. Access is most
certainly not aimed at people who read this site. It's a great tool for what
it does (GUI relational-ish data design and user interfaces, such as forms and
reports)

Yeah it's slow and crappy and weirdly integrated, but it's certainly more
powerful than any of the alternatives that I was aware of when I last used it
(mid 1990s).

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ibsulon
Wait... does anyone know of a startup other than Caspio that is looking to
target the Access market?

Rails isn't quite right for it. The world really does need an access-like
product.

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axod
Who would want to be the next Access? Access completely sucks. It's truly
awful.

~~~
cturner
Not in every respect. It's easy to create a schema in, and get a nice entity-
relationship diagram, and knock some data in. I don't know of another tool
that even comes close to being as lovely to work with for personal databases.
Of course.. a lot of evil is done because people use it for more than that.

Excel and Word have the same dyanamic. They're quick to get started in and
have a user interface to die for, and they're really really bad underneath.

For small single-user projects these things _can_ be OK. I do most of my
personal finances in a python tool, but run monthly position in excel. I write
speclets in Word because I like the default styling. It's great for quick
letters as well.

Both are dangerous for anything larger, or anything involving multiple users.

I'm trying to get my current organisation to be serious about using a wiki for
documentation tracking. I want to scream most days because of the way that use
of Word and email is hard-coded into people's brains regardless of how many
times I try to find tactful ways of winning people over by making the case for
how effective wiki is for merging, searching, history, navigation, version
control and centralised single-port-of-call. It doesn't have any effect.

The problem would just go away if there was a way to get Word to sit as
interface to a wiki, and excel as a frontend to something appropriate for its
datastructures - even if it meant significantly reducing the functionality of
the tools. Unfortunately the only way I know of of doing this involves using
sharepoint which has lots of lockin and deletes files when I save them in vim.
In the same way, I suspect Access would be fine if you used it as front-end to
a serious SQL database (of the three tools, the only one where such a thing is
practical).

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jherdman
This is basically my job right now.

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iamcalledrob
Windows-only UI nightmare?

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ableal
You may care to read the opinion in the article linked here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591102>

[Oracle office stuff] _did one thing better than any competitive product I
knew of: it stored everything as rows in the standard database_

