I am beginning the design phase of a small business application. ... My question is, all biases aside, is Perl the right thing? Would C/C++ or even VB be a better platform to do this in?

Most biases aside, I'd be surprised if something basic like order workflow for a small business isn't already available off-the-shelf.

If you want or need to go the build-it-yourself route, you'll find that Perl is very flexible. You can get at Access from Perl via either OLE or ODBC. That said, for simple things VB can be flexible, and you'll have the advantage of a lot of Microsoft-centric books with lots of examples. I would not go with C++. You'll spend too much time fighting the language and environment, and not enough time fighting the problem.

I infer from your PWS reference that you are building a browser-based application. If you were to require a native looking windows UI, VB is probably the way to go. (You can get there in Perl, but the learning curve is steeper and the path isn't as well documented.) But the playing field is more level when it comes to HTML-based UIs.

I do some personal development with Perl CGIs on PWS, and have found no problems moving that code to IIS (and no appreciable problems moving to Apache).

One warning: Microsoft Access is not a multi-user database, and isn't suitable for heavy concurrent access. Don't expect something build using Access to scale well.

In reply to Re: Is Perl the right solution... by dws
in thread Is Perl the right solution... by Lord Wrath

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.