Thank you all for your input, and certainly don't hesitate to contribute more if it applies. I suppose I gave a very light descriptions of the project, but it seems most of you picked up the important bits. Just to clarify this a little, this whole project is a voluntary free service i am attempting to provide to a small family owned and run niche-market store. They have been getting progressively slower in their delivery of orders and after hearing many of their customers discuss the length of time it takes to get their products, I decided to try and devise a setup that could help them out.
I am not using an off-the-shelf product because that would cost a great deal more money than I am willing to shell out for my own selfish designs {yes I am holding on to the hopes that this project will put me in good favor at their store}. The reason I selected Access is because I have a disposable copy of an older version that would be far better than running flat-files or Heaven-forbid, spending money on products. If there are any free-ware db's out there that are better than Access, let me know. I would love to dump Mickey-soft's lousy db in the trash at any time. The operating system will probably be win95 ors2 since I have an extra licensed copy of that as well.
As for using access to do the UI, no way. I have extensive knowledge of VB and can see no reason to use the annoying access forms and queries when ADO presents a perfectly workable solution. I mentioned the PWS only as a way to avoid using Perl's GUI which i have never touched and probably will not for quite some time.
I registered for the Monastery as a resource for work and have not been let down. My job uses Perl for all of our production solutions, but as yet there has not been any call for me to make a personal solution from Perl. I am still less than fluent in Perl and so I felt my judgement was not sufficiently educated to rule Perl in or out as the solution to this opportunity. I appreciate the alternate angle provided by an obviously experienced IS manager and agree that those are good points to take into consideration. They are things I should discuss with the prospective client, especially in the case of how far they see this solution carrying them. I don't even know if they have internet access at home or anything more than a credit-card link at the store. This project is entirely on my own time schedule at this point, so it's a unique position to be in.
At any rate, you have all brought up some very good points for me to chew on before I pound out a prototype. Thanks to everyone for their input and if Perl ends up being the choice, you can believe I'll be knocking on the gates with many questions.
Lord Wrath
The Mad Hacker... I mean Hatter... Oh nevermind!
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