[Love Calm Quiet]

I haven't explored the ins & outs of 4D because of the expense and learning curve, but was shown this special at www.4D.com/switch . Makes it sound worth evaluating (depending on what edition they provide for $99).

But I was sure intrigued to see on their site about 4D WebStar + 4D Mail, about which they say,
"Built for Mac OS X, 4D WebSTAR V fuses Unix power and stability with the ease of traditional Mac applications. With a simple and flexible Admin client, you have total control over your mail server, complete with remote access to your mail server's configuration. Effortlessly serve Web pages, publish databases, and share files—all with one single application."

Anybody using 4D for serving databases? Got any thoughts about it's universality/power compared to PHP/MySQL (where I'm still climbing the steep learning curve)?

[SPiNdustrious]

I have been a database dilettante for the past nine years. I have developed some projects for clients using Filemaker Pro and am starting to use PHP and MySQL exclusively for my database needs.

Throughout this period, I have been aware of 4D and have even played around with a demo of it (albeit years ago), but have never really noticed that it had a lot of traction in the database world. This could surely be as a result of me simply not being properly exposed to the database market, but I'd like to think that as a proper engineer, I would stay abreast of such things . My impression is that 4D simply isn't very common. It's certainly way behind PHP/MySQL in this regard.

I would stick with PHP/MySQL. It's free, and you certainly can't beat that. You also mention that you've stayed away from 4D because of its learning curve. Sure, it's GUI-based, but you can get some sweet front ends for MySQL that make it easier to visualize how your database is working. There is of course phpMyAdmin (www.phpmyadmin.net), a must-have for MySQL users (it will even help you by generating PHP code) and there are some interesting commercial/shareware applications that provide nice front ends as well (http://www.macosguru.com/macosguru3/products/ for instance...I tried a demo and liked it a lot!).

(There's always OS X Server...)

Ultimately, I think the choice comes down to convenience, function and price. What do you need your server to do? How soon do you need to have a solution in place? What sort of financial burden can you handle?

In my opinion, the only advantage Webstar has is speed of deployment and ease of configuration....

Tell us more about what you want to do. There is no one-size-fits-all solution out there.

-Peter

[bluedog]

My company's entire customer service/order entry/ and more is run from a 4d based software written by a third party. It scales very well for the number of users we have and the software (written by the 3rd party) works very well cross platform.

For its cost there are features that mysql in its incarnation doesn't have as full a feature set.

MySql and PHP is a great mix for low/NO cost. For rapid cross platform application development 4D is known in the industry but not the TOP DOG.

Look into it if you feel for the price, you'll be getting a very nice development system.

With that said, I use PHP and MySQL on our company website, because its free and the 3rd party application doesn't have their toolset to tie into the web constructed that well. 4D itself has a very nice system for doing most tasks via a web interface if necessary.

I'd say take a look at it again, and see if you can't sweeten the price deal a bit by asking!