I am a frequent R user (the very first program I turn on everyday when I back to office is RStudio and I spend >50% of time using R to do manipulation, tabulation and visualization of data). Sometimes I need to get involved in the data collection process of various research project, that is I need to develop a database with frontend to facilitate a clerk, or someone with little sense in programming/database to do the data entry job.
Since most of the data collection process involve manually inputting a questionnaire with more than 50 questions (100 – 200 columns when they presented as a spreadsheet), and there are relationship between different questionnaire (e.g. questionnaire A collect information from a shop, and questionnaire B collect information from the staff inside that shop), initially I use Access 2007 for the development. Access 2007 does the job, but only fairly.
My major complain on Access 2007 is as follow:
- developing the front-end is painful: after using R for long, I really hate using mouse to drag and drop boxes, and enabling some certain functions of a checkbox
- fair/poor multi-user support in my opinion: if I am the only one who use the Access 2007 program, I am fine with it, but things start to change now, we have multi-user logon to add/update/remove data at the same time, since the database is developed by someone else, I always fear that the data may get corrupted
- keep “reinventing the wheel”: the database developer build the user login module in Access 2007 all by himself, but should this be something of a standard that I can get it from somewhere?
- auto-compress the database and the database is VANISHED: yes, I do mean vanished, I tried it once, and it freaks me out, now I backup the access database all the time
In summary, I lost faith in Access 2007 to build a decent database for several staff (at most 20) to do the data entry/query work. So I turn to other options.
I am thinking of something like a “web-based” replace of Access 2007, xataface comes to me at first, but it doesn’t seem like a complete solution for me, it can fix some of my problem now, but may not be so for other problems.
Then I googled quite a bit: xataface -> nuBuilder -> Drupal -> Web Application Framework. Since I don’t find an exact alternative for Access 2007. I guess Web Application Framework is a way out.
In the Web Application Framework domain, I come across many names: CakePHP, RoR, Django, since I am not exactly a program/database/web developer, and I know nothing about PHP, Python, Ruby. I don’t know which one I should choose. Or should I learn the language before go to the framework?
Can anyone enlighten me here? I can provide additional information if needed. Thanks.
Try looking into VFront and nuBuilder. These allow you to build front ends to MySQL databases (i.e. forms, reports, etc.).