I have been developing M$-Access based solutions for about a decade. The more I dug deeper the more I’ve been dissatisfied. Therefore I started to look around for a new development tool.
I should “only” meet a few requirements.
- Open Source – not because I didn’t want to spend money but because I wantet to be free.
- Web based – I was tired of hassling aoround with all sorts of dependencies.
- Platform idependent – both for development and runtime.
- Multilanguage
- a GUI Designer
What I’ve been using (or tried to use) for all sorts of small apps from around 2005 was:
- CodeCharge Studio -misses 1,3,4
- ActiveGrid – missed 4 – and was discontinued – successor WaveMaker
- Wavemaker – missed only 4 – but sloooow designer
- RubyOnRails – missed 4, 5
- AwareIM – missed 4 – nice tool, easy to learn, solid apps but _very_ hard to extend
- Not to mention those that promised a lot but took hours to install…..
I don’t know if any of my unmet requirements from the above products have changed in the meantime.
But someday in spring 2008 I stumpled upon Open-Jacob. It was some sort of “love at the first sight”. It simply does everything I wanted to have.
The first application built with Open-Jacob had its go-live yesterday and more are to come.
Thanks a lot to Tarragon-Software, Achim Böken, Andreas Sonntag and Andreas Herz for building such a great tool !
