Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access

Maybe a bit closer, but still a huge miss. Both Rails and Django are frameworks for developers, whereas Access is more of a "prosumer" product for clever office workers.

If the OA was so impressed with Access, maybe he should learn real programming, because Rails and Django will never be as consumer-oriented as Access. You could build an Access-like program on top of some of the guts, but it would inevitably be just as dumbed-down and cumbersome as Access.

The vision is misguided.

I've been wondering about Django as a MS Access replacement as of late. I currently use either Rails or Sinatra, but Ruby has one major flaw as an MS Access replacement: it has lousy _native_ libraries for generating MS Excel files. You can get around this by using JRuby via the Apache POI library. I'm finding that setting up a JRuby stack is currently more complex than an plain old Ruby stack.

My understanding is that there are much better libraries for doing MS Excel generation and manipulation with Python.

It beats abusing Excel to accomplish the same objectives. Access is most certainly not aimed at people who read this site. It's a great tool for what it does (GUI relational-ish data design and user interfaces, such as forms and reports)

Yeah it's slow and crappy and weirdly integrated, but it's certainly more powerful than any of the alternatives that I was aware of when I last used it (mid 1990s).

Not in every respect. It's easy to create a schema in, and get a nice entity-relationship diagram, and knock some data in. I don't know of another tool that even comes close to being as lovely to work with for personal databases. Of course.. a lot of evil is done because people use it for more than that.

Excel and Word have the same dyanamic. They're quick to get started in and have a user interface to die for, and they're really really bad underneath.

For small single-user projects these things can be OK. I do most of my personal finances in a python tool, but run monthly position in excel. I write speclets in Word because I like the default styling. It's great for quick letters as well.

Both are dangerous for anything larger, or anything involving multiple users.

I'm trying to get my current organisation to be serious about using a wiki for documentation tracking. I want to scream most days because of the way that use of Word and email is hard-coded into people's brains regardless of how many times I try to find tactful ways of winning people over by making the case for how effective wiki is for merging, searching, history, navigation, version control and centralised single-port-of-call. It doesn't have any effect.

The problem would just go away if there was a way to get Word to sit as interface to a wiki, and excel as a frontend to something appropriate for its datastructures - even if it meant significantly reducing the functionality of the tools. Unfortunately the only way I know of of doing this involves using sharepoint which has lots of lockin and deletes files when I save them in vim. In the same way, I suspect Access would be fine if you used it as front-end to a serious SQL database (of the three tools, the only one where such a thing is practical).