I have been bouncing around an idea for a new pet project I could hack together in few weeks. My dad is a contractor and most of his work related data is scattered all over the place on snippets of paper, hand written estimates, word and excel documents, scanned bills and etc. So I figured I could put together a small application that would store all the customer information, estimate details, bills and etc. This way we could run reports on this data, analyze it and do other nifty stuff.
One thing I would really like is to generate nice looking estimate quotes and invoices on the fly, and get away from word based templates he usually uses. Ideally I would love all this data to sit in a MySQL database, and I would simply dump it into some kind of printable format. I’m thinking about producing latex output that could be later tweaked or compiled, or going straight to PDF (there have to be good libraries for that).
The point is that I could do nightly MySQL dumps, and back them up very easily. Word and Excel files get chunky real fast and tend to chew up more space. Not mentioning the fact that it is a royal pain in the ass to do automated reports over bunch of Office files.
I just can’t decide on the platform. I could probably very quickly develop a usable WAMP application. I have tons of experience with the platform, and it would be a piece of cake.
But, I do not really need this to be a web based application. It will most likely be a single user, desktop program. Since I have really strong grasp of Java I’m really tempted to try developing it as a nice GUI application. Once again, since I know what I’m doing I could probably get it done really soon. Either that, or I could use C# but I don’t really want to do that. Every time I code in .NET it makes me feel dirty. :P
Alternatively, I could use this project as an opportunity to learn something new. I have been itching to try Ruby on Rails for a while now, just to see what is all this hype about. The problem is – I know very little of Ruby. I know even less of Rails. But I want to put together something that is usable and maintainable.
Hmmm… What to do.. What to do… Suggestions?
Oh, and the first person to suggest using Quickbooks or some shit like that will be puncherized in the testiculars or equivalent area.
[tags]mysql, php, java, ruby on rails, programming, project[/tags]