Language for Developing a CD-ROM (or DVD, whatever) Application
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Hello, I figured this was the best place to put this since it's not language specific (in fact it's about choosing a language so I couldn't put it in the General Programming section). I'm about to start a project for a small company that publishes a kind of Top 500 Companies yearly magazine in my country. They want to try putting this data in a CD instead and sell it to a small-ish group of customers (500-1000 customers tops I assume). I'm experienced in several languages including Java, .NET (VB, C#), C/C++, some Flash, etc. I need to decide what platform I'm going to use according to these criteria: 1) Minimize setup (this one would probably rule out .NET with its big... .NET libraries that I just can't assume the users have by default) - the idea is that, barring a couple registry changes and maybe a desktop icon, no dependencies need to be installed. 2) Minimize programming time (so doing it in pure C/C++ for Windows would be a big hassle, unless there's some really cool framework I could use. Something easy like Windows Forms would be nice). 3) Free or Open-Source libraries if possible (this is a small project, with a really small profit margin). 4) Some degree of protection for the database (I'm thinking SQLite, with encryption at the column-level). This is just to avoid people double-clicking the database and opening it in Access or Excel or notepad or whatever. The application should mostly display a grid, allow some sort of drill-down (500 records for 500 companies, each with a small number of contacts). Perhaps have an intro of some sort, a splash screen, a menu, whatever. But mostly it's just a data browser with a read-only database, with the ability to sort and/or filter half a dozen columns, export to Excel or equivalent. Anyway... all I'm asking is for anyone experienced in this kind of work, which development language could be ideal for this. Like I said, unless there's some sort of fully functional stand-alone library that can be included in the disc without needing for install, .NET (and maybe Java?) are unlikely, and pure C would be a really error-prone and take too long (if everything else fails I'm going to have to use anyway). Any comments are welcome.
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Hello, I figured this was the best place to put this since it's not language specific (in fact it's about choosing a language so I couldn't put it in the General Programming section). I'm about to start a project for a small company that publishes a kind of Top 500 Companies yearly magazine in my country. They want to try putting this data in a CD instead and sell it to a small-ish group of customers (500-1000 customers tops I assume). I'm experienced in several languages including Java, .NET (VB, C#), C/C++, some Flash, etc. I need to decide what platform I'm going to use according to these criteria: 1) Minimize setup (this one would probably rule out .NET with its big... .NET libraries that I just can't assume the users have by default) - the idea is that, barring a couple registry changes and maybe a desktop icon, no dependencies need to be installed. 2) Minimize programming time (so doing it in pure C/C++ for Windows would be a big hassle, unless there's some really cool framework I could use. Something easy like Windows Forms would be nice). 3) Free or Open-Source libraries if possible (this is a small project, with a really small profit margin). 4) Some degree of protection for the database (I'm thinking SQLite, with encryption at the column-level). This is just to avoid people double-clicking the database and opening it in Access or Excel or notepad or whatever. The application should mostly display a grid, allow some sort of drill-down (500 records for 500 companies, each with a small number of contacts). Perhaps have an intro of some sort, a splash screen, a menu, whatever. But mostly it's just a data browser with a read-only database, with the ability to sort and/or filter half a dozen columns, export to Excel or equivalent. Anyway... all I'm asking is for anyone experienced in this kind of work, which development language could be ideal for this. Like I said, unless there's some sort of fully functional stand-alone library that can be included in the disc without needing for install, .NET (and maybe Java?) are unlikely, and pure C would be a really error-prone and take too long (if everything else fails I'm going to have to use anyway). Any comments are welcome.
How about a HTML Application[[^](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496\(VS.85\).aspx target= "New Window")]"? I've seen quite some good installers and browsers include some nice apps. You can use JavaScript or VBScript, and the speed is quite acceptable. This would be a example[^] that you can browse through, to evaluate the feasability of this option.