We are a software company that provides Inventory & Procurement
mangement to the hospitality industry. For the past twenty years we
have been using Progress Software as both the development language and
the underlying database. We are in the process of exploring new
languages to write our application in, as Progress is becoming
expensive for us.
Here are some of our issues
1. Progress is a 4GL language so it is very rapid development. We would
like something that is as fast or faster to develop in
2. We would like to be somewhat database agnostic but we are leaning
towards using MS SQL - Progress was an embedded database so it was very
easy to maintain (any suggestions here...are there other good embedded
databases)
3. We will probably (Eventually) be creating web services. It would be
nice if once we learn a language that we could easily use that language
to both CREATE webservices as well as use them (once again rapid
development is important)
4. Since we were using a 4GL lanaguage we are looking for tools that
will help us with a lot of the code development (suggestions? I have
seen YesSoftware and it looks pretty good)
5. We want something that is OO and runs quickly
6. Our current app is developed in a rich GUI interface. It is similar
in nature to an applet where only the Form that is required is
downloaded to the clients local machine. Otherwise everything remains
on the server (thus making it easy to send updates to our clients). Can
C# achieve this?
8. There seems to be a large community of C users what about C#? Are
there a number of user groups in the US?
9. We will eventually be providing multi-language capabilities... does
C# support this?
10. We need a language that is easy to learn and can provide us with
good connections to databases
11. What are the posatives and negatives of using C#?
12. If you were chosing between C# and PHP and Java which one would you
go with and why (good and bad of both)
13. We are interested in cross platform capabilities. Today most of our
customers use Windows, so this is not a critical feature, but since you
never know exactly what the futre brings it would be nice to go either
way
14. Does anyone know of a web based open source inventory managment or
ERP application? Something with a lot of depth to it that is currently
being used in a manufacturing environment?
Any insight you can provide on selecting the next language for us would
be appreciated. Also we need to take in to consideration the total cost
of deploying the application, including webservers, datbases, etc.
This is a big decision for us, so I appologize for such a lenghty post.
