technology recommendation for LAN Dashboard

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm about to start a fairly large project for a mid-sized business with a lot of integration with other systems (POS, accounting, website, inventory, purchasing, etc.) The purpose of the system is to try to reduce current data siloing and give employees role-based access to the specific data entry and reports they need, as well as to replace some manual and redundant business processes. The system needs to be cross-platform (Windows/Linux), open source and is primarily for LAN use.

My experience is mostly PHP/web/app development, but I have developed a few LAN apps using Java/Servoy (like Filemaker). I found Servoy to be very rapid and to easily make use of different data providers (DB products), but it's not open source, and any non-standard development is in Java/Swing (which is verbose and takes a lot of time).

I'm interested in learning Python/Django or Ruby/Rails - but I'm not sure if these are the best solutions for building a mission critical data entry/reporting LAN app. Is a web client/server really a good choice for this type of application?

Thanks in advance for any tips/ advice.

manpreet 2 years ago