I am looking for some feedback on small application development. Does anyone have any advice for languages or tools that are well designed for novices who would like to get an idea off the ground and exert effort into the project instead of the syntax and pecularities of a language? It seems there are a number of applications like Adobe Director, Tersus, and even Flash to a degree enable small application development that is more visual/task oriented than text based.
This probably doesn't have a lot of appeal to most, but for someone like me (who doesn't develop apps for a living and is too busy to become a hobbyist) that ability to create small applications to meet specific needs (especially if they can be used as stand alone or web based apps) is a big plus.
What got me thinking on this topic was I ment a gentleman who created a flash card application in Adobe Director. It is a standalone app or can work via the web with the Shockwave plugin. He didn't design his app to accept new vocabulary so I have pondered making my own application as I am teaching a class this winter and would like to make it available to my students.
So I would like to begin a project to develop a "Vocabulary Flash Card" application. I have fiddled with PHP and MySQL in the past as well as a little Pascal in school. After fidgetting with a couple PHP and Java based applications it is pretty clear they are well beyond my currently rusty skills--which were not too great to begin with.
I had considered Adobe/Macromedia Flash but the last version I have is MX2004 and I haven't touched it since 2004. Director is an option, but pricy.
Ironically after toying with Kodu (everyone with a 360 should try this out!) I must admit that I very much enjoyed the "visual" programming model--a lot even. Curious to see what else was out there and it appears there is a number of tools and languages aimed at this approach. Macromedia I guess had an application called Authorware for visual programming and according to Wiki there is a bit of material out there on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
In particular I thought the following looked interesting and could possibly meet my needs: http://www.tersus.com/
But the real question is does anyone have any feedback or advice, both for rapid application development (standalone or web), as well as any tools they have found well suited for the job, especially novices looking to more tinker with an idea than learning a new language. I know purist will think this a bad attitude, but I am genuininely interested in the concept of visual application development as it seems much more intuitive (and probably inefficient!).
Ok, now you can throw your rotten fruit and veggies.
This probably doesn't have a lot of appeal to most, but for someone like me (who doesn't develop apps for a living and is too busy to become a hobbyist) that ability to create small applications to meet specific needs (especially if they can be used as stand alone or web based apps) is a big plus.
What got me thinking on this topic was I ment a gentleman who created a flash card application in Adobe Director. It is a standalone app or can work via the web with the Shockwave plugin. He didn't design his app to accept new vocabulary so I have pondered making my own application as I am teaching a class this winter and would like to make it available to my students.
So I would like to begin a project to develop a "Vocabulary Flash Card" application. I have fiddled with PHP and MySQL in the past as well as a little Pascal in school. After fidgetting with a couple PHP and Java based applications it is pretty clear they are well beyond my currently rusty skills--which were not too great to begin with.
I had considered Adobe/Macromedia Flash but the last version I have is MX2004 and I haven't touched it since 2004. Director is an option, but pricy.
Ironically after toying with Kodu (everyone with a 360 should try this out!) I must admit that I very much enjoyed the "visual" programming model--a lot even. Curious to see what else was out there and it appears there is a number of tools and languages aimed at this approach. Macromedia I guess had an application called Authorware for visual programming and according to Wiki there is a bit of material out there on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
In particular I thought the following looked interesting and could possibly meet my needs: http://www.tersus.com/
But the real question is does anyone have any feedback or advice, both for rapid application development (standalone or web), as well as any tools they have found well suited for the job, especially novices looking to more tinker with an idea than learning a new language. I know purist will think this a bad attitude, but I am genuininely interested in the concept of visual application development as it seems much more intuitive (and probably inefficient!).
Ok, now you can throw your rotten fruit and veggies.
). The way I would do it (which is a bit low-level, admittedly) is make a simple HTML page with Javascript that reads its data from an XML file and shows it interactively using DHTML or Ajax or whatever. You could easily run this both online and offline. I made a full Magic Card (Fifth Edition woohoo) database in a similar way, except back then XML didn't exist yet (I'm old!).