Revolution for enterprise SAP-style applications?

[Russ McBride]

Hi,

It's been a few years since I've used Revolution.

We've got a messy set of systems here that keep the front end and  
back end of our store running and I'm exploring ideas for  
inexpensively consolidating and streamlining them to reduce  
complexity and redundancy.  One possibility is rebuilding everything  
from the ground up in RR.  I'm not sure that it can do it though.   
Basically, we need to rebuild nothing less than a "junior-SAP"  
system, a set of the following:

--a point-of-sale system
--an inventory management system
--some custom apps that access remote web services
--a content control system for web site data (simpler than Hemingway,  
e.g.)
--some custom bookkeeping apps

The goal would be to reduce our 4 overlapping databases down to one  
so it means that these apps would be heavily database-centric,  
probably built on FrontBase, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.  And I would need  
to easily tie in some Objective-C code and Java code (and ideally  
some Ruby code) when necessary.  The web content system would have to  
feed into some flat files for the WebDNA web app system we're using  
until we get around to rebuilding our WebDNA/WebObjects composite  
system.

At one point Geoff Canyon made it sound like RealBasic might be  
better for database-intensive applications.

Unfortunately our environment at the University here requires custom  
applications, but we don't have the $$ for an actual SAP-style  
setup.  Having used RR for some apps quite awhile ago my first  
impression is that it might be perfect, er--the only possible  
candidate--for rapidly building an inexpensive, but comprehensive set  
of apps.  My other choices would be RealBasic (more code, but maybe a  
more desirable language), Cocoa (but this wouldn't be truly rapid--at  
least not for me), Ruby on Rails (but I don't want web interfaces),  
WebObjects (ditto), or Cocoa-Ruby (interesting, but limited to Mac),  
or Ruby + TK (unstable GUI system).

What do you think?  Any tips, anecdotes, or suggestions appreciated.

Thanks very much,




Russ McBride
Programmer/Analyst, PhD Cadidate
The Scholar's Workstation
University of California at Berkeley
510-643-6853