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I'm looking for a visual database application development tool (GUI based, or script) that we can use to develop an application that takes a set of text and numeric fields through a series of transformations that build numerous many-to-many and hierarchical relationships among the data elements (eg, multiple master-detail relationships)

[EDIT - since initial question ]

I have found a number of products that will let our DBA's define tables and SQL.. and then our "designers" can use these GUI PHP generators to create forms based web pages against the MySQL tables/sql

  • ScriptCase
  • Xlinesoft phprunner
  • Codecharge
  • Sqlmaestro phpgenerator

any insights into these solutions pro or con would be appreciated. for instance: how clean is the code generated? I notice that some have more complicated run-time setups.. as opposed to "pure" script output.

thanks much

stebbin45
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  • just found this which looks sort of relevent but not sure it can handle the complex data models we need.. http://www.scriptcase.net/phpgenerator/features/features.php – stebbin45 Aug 28 '11 at 21:16
  • What's the reason for going visual instead of SQL statements? Do you need to visualize it or don't want to touch SQL? If you're afraid of SQL it might be best to try to learn it, it's not that hard and down the path you'll benefit a lot from it. – Marius Burz Aug 28 '11 at 21:51
  • I guess its really about the productivity and being able to let a range of people with different skills work on app design.. I'm sure we will have to hack the SQL.. but with a good rapid app dev tool (I'm hoping), the code should be 80% there for forms driven apps – stebbin45 Aug 29 '11 at 04:46

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I have used CodeCharge Studio a coupe years ago, and I liked it - but I wouldn't use it again because what it generates is hard to be modified outside the environment - it's highly tied to its IDE and its framework.

Also, if you have to do something that is "uncommon" (which means something not being natively supported/implemented), it can be a little hard and tricky. I remember I had hard time trying to implement a lookup listbox (for instance, I select a country from a listbox and a 2nd listbox is populated with the list of states) - although I think it has been added as native control in one of the latest versions.

However it's very very good for quickly prototyping, or if the size of "custom" development is not huge - otherwise the additional time you spend making your logic or custom UI to work overtakes what you saved with code generation.

Another advantage is that you can choose among several languages (PHP, Java, Perl, C#, etc.)

If you're not against .NET, and you have a higher budget, I have to recommend a very good product I evaluated not long ago: Iron Speed, which can literally let you generate a complete database driven application in less than 1 hour. Code is 100% modifiable externally (it generates a Visual Studio solution), but of course for better results it's preferable to stay within the iron speed IDE.

My experience with it, as said, is limited to evaluation only (just because the project I was working on wasn't a typical database driven website - and haven't worked on other projects since then, otherwise I had already bought it), but I created myself a simple time tracking application as a test project, and I didn't spend more than 1 day, working in "learning" mode (that is, trying to understand how things work rather than develop as fast as possible). There are a lot of videos on their website, so I suggest you to have a look.

Antonio
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