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I have been assigned responsibility for figuring out the best tools to use for building our intranet. As my boss keeps saying, we will have only one shot at this, so we want to get it right.
In terms of what we want our Intranet to do, we see it as a way of delivering data. It's not going to have employee handbooks or other happy info. Our intranet basically will be a reporting tool for a very wide variety of data. My hands are fulling getting the data together, so the front end development has to be super easy and fast at deploying the data on the web.
To give you an idea of what this data is: for the last year, I have been building a super cool set of DB's in SQL Server. It contains all our company sales, customers, distribution, nd product data. Basically, I have access to all data in the company. We sell about $40M in product per month.
My assignment is to webify a lot of that data. Users will have to login, and based on their privileges, they will be able to see and edit various data. Most of the time, they just need to view data that is entered into the DB via other, online transaction systems. However, the web architecture also needs to support OLTP, without my having to spend a day programming each set of transaction screens. I need to be able to create a set of screens for adding, editing, and deleting records within a few minutes, once the data is defined in the DB.
Ideally, the data definitions in the DB would drive how the data appears on the web. In other words, binary fields would show up as check boxes, text fields as text boxes, phone numbers and zip codes automatically validated to be in right format, without me having to program routines... stuff like that.
Supposedly, VisualInterDev 6.0 provides much of this functionality for developers, but it is not as completely simple to throw data onto web pages as I think it should be.
I'd like to be able to spend nearly all my time as a developer working on the DB back end. Ideally, when data needs to be webifed, I would create the right tables and/or views, then basically hit a button that says "put this table or view on a web page" and it would fall right where it should within our web application.
I understand that an environment like that would require a lot of setup, but that is the kind of situation we are looking for.
The only real givens in this scenario are:
1. Microsoft SQL Server is our DB, running on Windows 2000 Server. It will be upgraded to Windows Server 2003 in the near future. We also will upgrade to Yukon when Microsoft comes out with it (Yukon is the next release of SQL Server 2000).
2. Web server platform can be Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, AIX, Linux, or AS-400.
3. If there is a strong reason, we can convert from SQL Server 2000 to Oracle, but like I said, there has to be a really good reason.
Any ideas?
As always, all contributions will be appreciated immensely, and rewarded with points.
Regards,
-Danimal
