Hello -

I have recently been tasked with writing a multi-user application to capture patient exam data and then use that data to facilitate producing a medical report about the exam - fairly small scale, maybe 50 users. The backend is MySQL running on a Linux box. The burning question is: What is the best choice for the front-end? I'm starting with MSAccess, since it's easy to develop the user forms I'll need. But should I really be thinking in terms of Perl/PHP? Some other choice? My impression given my limited web development has been that designing user forms (and I'll need several) in a web app is a pain - hard to position controls just where you want them, and you need a good deal of scripting to validate user inputs before a form is submitted to the server. Are there tools for designing web forms that can make it worthwhile to think about this app in terms of something other than MS Access?

Can Access speak to MySQL? I thought it will only see Jet.
I guess it generates SQL so how do you tell it to use another DBMS?

Learn perl, I dont know of any applications which can generate perl forms made in a gui. Hopefully someone will be in the know

Just found this thread

http://www.dbforums.com/t1002151.html

Helps me

Yes, you can build the front-end with Access. From the MySQL website:

"MySQL Connector/ODBC (also known as MyODBC) allows you to connect to a MySQL database server using the ODBC database API on all Microsoft Windows and most Unix platforms, including through such applications and programming environments such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, and Borland Delphi."

http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/odbc/

If you need multi-platform compatibility, look into Borland JBuilder and MySQL Connector/J for the Java platform.