[Year 12 IT Apps] query RE macintosh db & programming tools

[Roland Gesthuizen]

Sorry for the late reply .. Whilst I was at NECC2008 in San Antonio (a
thousand thankyou's to my school and VITTA for both sponsoring my
partipation on the ACCE2008 study tour) I happened to notice how many
schools in the USA were using FileMaker. The product has come a long way
from when I last tinkered with it in the late 1990's. I must get myself
along to a workshop one day.

Laurie is right, you can easily do some really cool stuff with PHP and
MySQL. Kevork has authored a great resource that help you get started, just
look around the new VITTA website for details .. in fact, this is what
powers the VITTA website! I notice that OpenOffice.org Base version 3 for
the Mac is now out of Beta with a native Aqua version. It can easy network
with an SQL server and is worth adding to your 2009 iMac image for
deployment. We already have it running on our school network and students
are free to take this home on the OpenCD we issue.

We are also migrating to the Mac / Netbook platform in a big way for 2008.
Interested in your plans (perhaps on the eLearning list)

Regards Roland

2008/10/16 Laurie Savage <sav at pvgc.vic.edu.au>

> Macs are "Unix" under the hood and if my memory serves me well PHP and
> possible Python and/or Ruby are sitting there as well just waiting for the
> command line to be opened up. As for relational DBs - Filemaker is
> interesting. I find it less robust than its Windows cousins and I wouldn't
> use it for anything more mission critical than an address book or office
> memo system, but it's fairly easy to use. For me the features that make it
> user friendly - build relationships in an ad hoc fashion, calculations
> embedded in the forms, the form as a metaphor rather than a table - are its
> central problems in terms of speed, robustness and creating queries. But I
> haven't built/sold any Filemaker apps in a while and it might have changed!
>
> LS
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:
> itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au]
> On Behalf Of Adam Barbary
> Sent: Thursday, 16 October 2008 10:08 AM
> To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] query RE macintosh db & programming tools
>
> Filemaker Pro (available for Windows too)
>
> Adam Barbary
> Viewbank College
>
> On 16/10/2008, at 10:49 AM, Bicknell, Paul P wrote:
>
> > We have been a Windows school up to now but we are converting to
> > Macintosh later this year. So I am interested to hear from people the
> > names of the relational db and programming tools that they use for ITA
> > using the Mac platform.
> > Thanks
> > Paul Bicknell, Maribyrnong SC
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-- 
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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