3 replies to this topic

[lownote14]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on this forum and starts with an interesting question. First I'll explain what I want. I have to store a whole bunch of data, ie names of people with a whole bunch of different pieces of information per person. And I'm not talking just ten or so, more like 100's of different names with unique pieces of information per name. The other thing I need to do is have it be run from a stand alone executable type thing. When it's executed I'd like it to come up with an interactive panel where you can select any of the names from the data, enter some numbers in key places and the program will fill out a bunch of needed information for the user.

I was previously doing this project in excel, but ran into a problem with compatibility that I just don't feel like dealing with. Not everyone that would be using my program will have excel so, thus the need for a stand alone executable that my users can just grab from a flash drive throw it on the desktop and use the program.

So my question comes down to this, what system of programs would be best suited for this? I have some programming experience in C++ but am willing to learn anything that might make this project work the best. I hope I gave you guys enough information to help me. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
-lownote14

[ZekeDragon]

If you already know C++ there is probably no reason that you should learn another language or technology to accomplish this, you can write this program in C++ using a GUI toolkit like Qt, wxWidgets, gtkmm, .NET C++/CLI, FLTK, etc. There's a lot out there for C++ to do this, and writing to files in binary or text form is trivial. Almost all of those toolkits also provide WYSIWYG GUI builders to help speed along the process of developing those.

So when it comes to which language you should use, that boils right down to personal taste, and since you already know C++, I don't see why you can't use it to do this.

[WingedPanther]

The language doesn't matter all that much. The key is going to be how to store the data. Based on your requirements, the obvious options are SQLite (you would need to learn SQL as well), XML, or as binary data.Any of those options are equally valid. If you think you are likely to get to thousands or millions of people, I'd lean towards SQLite.

[GeorgeW]

I agree, the language isn't critical, and since you have some experience with C++, then that will do everything you want (and a whole lot more!). For the database though, I would lean towards SQL 2008 express. It will do everything you need, and it's free. As WP said though, SQL Lite is good as well.