December 14, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Russell Lees (12/14/2010)
Take a look in a small manufacturing company like the one I work for, we had an IT department of 7 including 4 IBM AS400 programmers when I joined IT in 1999. Now we have to use the corporate SAP system and have an IT department of one. SAP is so cumbersome and hard to get data out of, our company lives and breathes on Access and Excel systems.
That brings up what I would consider a better topic for discussion: Instead of deprecating the tools with training wheels, how about discussing the impact of "Enterprise" applications which rely on Javascript (running in a browser) for customization? Am I the only one who dreads writing (and painfully debugging) Javascript?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but that has to be one of the most deceptively labor-consumptive trends to come along.
December 15, 2010 at 12:37 pm
When used appropriately, Access does the job quite nicely. I can package an Access database in an installer and have a customer up and running in minutes. (and they dont even have to have Access installed!) My applications can use Access or SQL Server backend depending on customer needs, (size, usage, existing database environment, IT resources) so if necessary, we can upsize them. A POS system I wrote years ago supported Access, SQL Server, and MySQL. With Access, I found that changing to the OLEDB driver resolved many performance and concurrent user issues.
December 29, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Calling Access, Excel, and other tools low-end IS NOT a deprecation of the tool itself. They are considered low-end development tools because they fit into the low-end of the application lifecycle management systems for software design. They have immense value in any software designers toolkit. They are also considered low-end due to their relatively low acquisition cost compared to other high-end design systems such a Visual Studio Ultimate or IBM's Websphere products.
You couldn't say your common flat head screw driver is invaluable or unnecessary next to a high cost electronic driver with all possible sort of added laser gadgets. So why think calling Access a low-end development tool is somehow deprecating the tool?
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." -- Martin Fowler
December 30, 2010 at 7:23 am
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"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 30, 2010 at 7:24 am
You could call MS Access a low end development tool, because it supports the construction of complete applications, having a scripting language, forms, database, and reporting engine all bundled together. However, many people use it just for reporting from external data sources like SQL Server or Oracle.
In the case of MS Excel, I wouldn't even call it an application development tool, it's a data analysis tool. In the hands of a user who actually read the manual, it's a very capable data analysis tool. It does have an integrated scripting and forms engine, but only a small percentage of Excel users are building end to end applications.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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