I mainly develop Java EE webapps so I don’t have any experiences with desktop application at all. Now a friend of mine needed a little tool for daily business which I’ve build with Seam and a MySQL db in the background. In case of my experience this was done really fast.
Now I want to go further and produce a real small desktop app for him. I’ve looked at various options and developing a gtk# application with Mono seems my way to go for this little project. The application should be small and fast so I was thinking if a whole MySQL server is needed for my solution here.
What options I could evaluate instead of a database server which has to run as a service on the workingmachine? Storing data as XML?
To clarify the application has now 6 entites (Products, ProductTypes, Colors, Sizes, Orders, Production). On daily basis orders and production are added to a ProductType, very simple stuff.
XML would work for small sets up data, but if you are going to have larger sets I would recommend something like sqlite.
http://www.sqlite.org/