For rapid development, easy long-term maintenance, and an already familiar look and feel for end users, consider designing the front end as a CGI application, served from a webserver on your LAN.

This approach has a lot of advantages:

• Changes to the front end can be made easily simply by working with the code on the central server.
• Changes to backend functionality can also be done easily on the central server, rather than on each user's installation of some software. In other words, software updates only have to be installed on the server, rather than on each user's system.
• Since you control the server, you control the operating environment of the script.
• Browsers already know how to print to printers, take input (textboxes, etc), render documents (HTML, graphics, and even PDF), and so on. You don't even have to worry about the nuances between Macs, PC's, Unix/Linux vs Win32, etc. Your script runs on the server you control, and is accessed via CGI over the LAN by its users' browsers.

I'm a fan of getting it up and running quickly, and for that, it's hard to beat an intranet CGI script.

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