Re: Is it good idea to transition from MS Access to a webapp? And if so, is Django a good tool to do it?

[Fred Stluka]

Patrik, Yes, Django can be used for that.  The "ORM" features and the "templates" and "views" of Django make it very easy to do a "CRUD" app for a users to create/ retrieve/update/delete data in any RDBMS.  There are some built-in security features like logins, protection against "CSRF" attacks, etc.  Django "formsets" make it easy to show multiple rows with a details panel for the row currently selected. With a web app, you won't have to re-distribute the front end.  Just push a new version to the server. Django's templates and views both support "inheritance", which should solve your problem of managing multiple related forms.  And, there are many Open Source custom widgets for Django and for _javascript_ that will give you all the sub-grouping and tree-views that you need. Django scales very well to large amounts of data, large numbers of screens, and large numbers of users.  There are many performance tuning options, including "caching" of templates, and of fully-constructed pages, and of DB data.  Also, lots of other "middleware" for security, performance, logging, and other "aspects" of the software. Yes, you can run a Django server locally, behind a "firewall", or can expose it to the world, securing various parts as needed. To make it as secure as possible, I'd put in on a Linux server that is protected by tools like Logwatch, Fail2ban, and Tripwire.  See: - http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#unix_security And be sure to redirect all page requests from HTTP to HTTPS. I do all of this and more, including processing financial transactions and supporting "multitenancy", restricting access by thousands of different users, each to his own data, plus "attribute based access control" for cases where data is shared, at the Web site I'm currently working on: - http://HelpHOPELive.org Sorry for all the terms and acronyms, but if you're considering writing such an app, you'll need to be aware of them and they're all pretty easy to Google.  Feel free to reply with more questions.  Also, you'll quickly get a feel for Django's power if you go through the on-line tutorial at: - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/ Enjoy! --Fred Fred Stluka -- mailto:f...@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/ Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service! Open Source: Without walls and fences, we need no Windows or Gates. On 4/29/16 12:57 PM, Patrik Mjartan wrote: Hi, I work for a very small company that I developed an application for, all using MS Access (it has back-end MS Access db - although this is planned to change to some more robust RDBMS, and a front-end app built in MS Access). Currently this app is used to calculate the exact wages of some employees (sorry, English is not my native language so I don't know how that type of wage is called here, but basically we look at how many products they produced and calculate it based on that. It's not a hourly wage). However, this summer I would like to expand it to do some order management too (ie. each order has specific products that need to be produced... each of those can be produced by our employees and so it's directly linked to the wages). However, it is very hard to manage everything using MS Access. Basically each time I make any change to FE or BE, I have to re-distribute the FE to all of the front-users. This is not a HUGE problem, the big problem, however, is within the MS Access itself, that is, it's very hard to manage all the forms as they are listed as simple names (ie. you cannot sub-group them efficiently to make a tree-view). Overall I cannot see myself working with MS Access in 5 years time as I can already see the scalability problems after a few months of working with it. What I thought of, however, is making a website that is only for local use, but is it possible to have the same functionality as a regular front-end app? Is this good idea to begin with? I had a brief look at Django (I'm VERY new to web-dev, but I'm a fast learner I like to think) and I really like it so far. But is it possible to have the same level of functionality MS Access offers? That is, for example a sub-form on a form that gives more details about the current record selected in the main form? Ie. main form consists of overview of 10 recent orders and the lower portion of the main form is a subform that displays some detailed info about a selected order. How does it stand from security-perspective if the app is changed from local to public? Obviously even on local I'd imagine I'd put a login requirement there, similar to how the admin page has it, but how safe is it regardless if put to public? Are there pre-determined measures that if taken, it will be 100% secure? As you'd imagine I wouldn't be very happy if someone deleted all of our inventory records because they could bypass the logging system. Is there any good literature I can read up on doing some similar exercises/examples? For instance: orders/inventory management web app? Thanks a lot in advance! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. 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