Trying to control OKI Microline 590 24-pin printer

[Stephen Barncard]

Depending on your expansion plans, you have a lot of choices, 
starting with the simplest.

You could use a tab-delimited database system using text files.

You could use a custom-property based database system in a stack. 
These could be turned into speedy arrays directly for quick access.

You could use the limited SQL set in the included altSQLlite in REV 2.8.1

(It's a small subset of MySQL but it works for some situations. But 
that locks you into a single-user based system.)

The next step is multiuser, and installing and setting up a local or 
remote server. With Valentina, MySQL, or PostGresql, these all can be 
expanded to multiuser server use with no code changes.

My current fave is MySQL; my ISP Dreamhost offers it free with my 
account and it's very inexpensive, especially when there's a need for 
a web site anyway. And you can run MySQL in localhost mode on your 
machine - I'm not saying it's free, but the software is available at 
the http://mysql.org site. the 5.0.2 version absolutely rocks.


If you need more versatility and performance than MySQL offers, check 
out Valentina. I think they have limited-record trial versions and 
packages for all size projects. http://www.valentina-db.com/

Finally, there are free open source softwares including at the top Postgresql.
http://www.postgresql.org/download/

All of these can be translated between, dumped and more easily 
utilized in Transcript using Trevor's DB library.
http://mangomultimedia.com/developer/revolution/

For accessing and uploading data there's CocoaMySQL for the Mac. Many 
others for PC.
new beta http://cocoamysql.sourceforge.net/beta/CocoaMySQL_0.7b5.zip

sqb


>  Well, what I'm trying to do is create a tool that allows a shipping 
>company to print their shipping forms, but use data from a 
>host-based database.
>
>I would have thought that Microsoft Excel would be a lousey 
>print-formatting tool too, but somehow they use it.? If I can create 
>a tool that can do this and bypass Excel, then it's a win-win.
>
>The goal would be to allow a user to enter data via a nice GUI 
>front-end, and then allow the user to select that data record at any 
>point in time and print the shipping form to the dot-matrix printer.
>

-- 


stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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