I want to build a free app to become familiar with what is required, but I was always confused about the steps one needs to take to START a software project.
What are the steps required in order to develop a mobile app?
I will list some of the things I think should be done but I don't necessarily know how to do. Any advice, details and technologies you have to accomplish these steps would be awesome.
Decide which platform you want to develop. What are some of the pros and cons in this area for android vs iOS vs Windows8?
How to test the app - can you get free hardware to test with a well detailed app plan? Emulator?
Detail what you want the app to do and which functionalities you want.
Research if this app already exists. What are some areas of concerns in terms of not breaking the law such as patent infringement etc?
Setup a source repository such as git (google a guide I guess?)
Look at guides to familiarize yourself with APIs and write sample code to learn what you need?
Start the development and keep doing the above as needed.
Starting a software project can be as easy as start writing code. Most programmers will have an intuition as to what needs to be done and how it could be done. The other extreme of starting a software project is to start with talking to a client (or looking at the world) and figuring out what the problem is. I find that a thorough understanding of the problem you are trying to address with a project is already a long way into getting the project done painlessly. It'll give you a good understanding of what is required for you to call your project done.
So I guess point number one becomes: know what the problem is you're solving. Knowing this will also tell you if any existing app solves the same problem to a satisfying standard.
NOTE: I am not that familiar with the Windows 8 platform so my answer mostly talks about iOS and Android. The issues raised however are broad enough to cover large parts of the Windows platform.
Platform
Selecting a deployment platform is an important part of a launching a product, and a lot of other decisions depend on the platform. We are in the unfortunate state that two major mobile OSes exist that are separate in terms of code development and reuse. When considering selecting your deployment platform you'll want to think about the audience, and the (potential) sub set of the audience that is willing to pay for your application. Android might have to most devices out there but iPhone makes the most money (also for developers). However, remember that there are lots of apps out there and most developers don't ever make any (or not enough) money out of their apps.
Getting into app development with the aim of getting rich is going to leave you dissappointed. That's not very likely, then again someone always wins the lottery as well. It is a good way though to get employed and make some money that way.
Then there is the question of programming language (Java, Objective-C or C#). This is largely decided on what you are already familiar with, and if you aren't then refer back to the previous point.
Testing
Testing the product is a tricky thing. You'll have to start off with the emulator (which is usually provided with the development pack). Sooner or later however you'll have to test the app on hardware. I doubt you'll get your hands on free hardware but borrowing from friends and relatives is always an option. There may also be businesses that rent out test hardware to developers, if there isn't then I suppose that's one business idea to work on.
The platform choice will affect this also. Android is running on a much wider range of hardware than iOS.
Patent infringment
I don't know that much about patent issues, other than software patents are nasty. As a single developer I wouldn't be too worried about infringing on patents, the main purpose of them is to keep competitors at bay. What usually ends up happening is that big companies kill off competition with patent lawsuits, or they buy a smaller company that holds a nice collection of patents.
If you want to be on the safe side (meaning you own a company and are really doing this to make money) then talk to patent lawyers.
Code repository
A code hosting service like GitHub is fantastic in that it not only provides a place to have you code, but it also provides issue trackers for keeping notes on the functionality that is still missing or bugs that have crept up in your software.
The best places to start learning about Git are git-scm.com and the GitHub help pages.
Software development plan
Your last point explodes to a thing called software engineering. There has been lots of research into different ways of managing software development projects. The idea being that software development tends to be extended over long periods of time, the requirements of the project change during the project (as you learn more) and the project can involve anything from 1 to 100s of developers. Some way coordinating work between those developers (and all other parties involved like customers) has to be formalised, enter software engineering. The aim is to define a methodology and project structure that guides the development process and makes it more likely that the requirements are met at the end of the project.
Some models worth looking into include (Test Driven Development and other agile methods).
Finally I would add to the list of things that need to be done
Research libraries, note that this comes before familiarising yourself with the APIs of those libraries.
What software already exists that does a part of what you want to achieve. This goes partly back to the question of what platform to use. Apple has put a lot of attention in developing easy to use frameworks to support iOS app development. I am not that familiar with Andoird's or Windows 8 but the less code you have to write the faster the product will be done.
1 http://mobiledevices.about.com/od/kindattentiondevelopers/tp/Android-Os-Vs-Apple-Ios-Which-Is-Better-For-Developers.htm
There is only one step needed: Just start that project!
You are going to develop a free application, so it should be fun to do that. Choose whatever you like and keep going:
Make sure you are productive enough -- 10 Laws of Productivity
Avoid complexity -- Occam's razor, KISS principle
Let CI system do the boring stuff -- Machines should work; people should think.
Read books and improve yourself.
Please also avoid blind decisions. If you simply try several available options you'll eventually find the best way to achieve your goals. Do some PoC and decide. Nowadays 1-2 hours should be enough to start with any technology. This is the rule of maturity. You have your own goals, so it is better to avoid immature solutions.
Happy coding.
CPlayer I came to this forum with the same question since I am new to mobile app design and want to make my own app. I realize it is important to take certain steps in the correct order so that wasted time is minimized or eliminated. I did some research and came across two online sources I believe, if they are put together as one, will make one better source. The links are:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2311-a-mobile-app-development-checklist/
http://mobiledevices.about.com/od/kindattentiondevelopers/ht/How-To-Create-An-App-For-The-Iphone.htm
Good Luck,
laroice
Related
We are in the process of deciding a route to take for a new CRM system. We've had Salesforce come in and give us their pitch and the developers have had a little play with it, made it do a few things we need etc...
It's hard for us to get a good idea of the pros and cons until we start to develop with it and if you start, you are tied in to a year contract for X number of users and it's pretty expensive as it is..
So, my question. Who has developed for sales force platform? how did you find the experience? would you recommend it as a good solution? Should we just continue with our ruby/rails/mongo systems?
Thanks!
The good news is the amount of customization you can do via configuration is amazing. The out-of-box functionality is very strong and you get a pretty nice security model and reporting system included.
Having said that, when you do need to do custom development beyond what the configuration can support, the pain can start;
-APEX is the most frustrating (modern?) language I have ever worked with.
-Deployment/Migration can be slow and painful (some things cannot be migrated, e.g. Approval processes)
-APEX is a rather immature language missing much of the concepts of .net or java
-Debugging is messy (log actually gets truncated at a certain length, no stepping)
Having said all that, SalesForce.com is a very strong CRM - 90% of the custom work you'll want to do will be really smooth and fast, the remainder will be extremely painful.
Management has asked us to look into implementing licensing features into some existing applications. Up to this point these apps were simply paid for and customers could install them as they please. We need to implement a new licensing model to generate more revenue because our older products work well enough that people do not have a reason to upgrade. So our new customers will have to pay licensing fees and/or be limited to how many installations they can have. I have never dealt with this stuff before, so please pardon my ignorance. I need as much guidance as possible (steering me in the right direction would be great!). We need the following...
Time limited demo versions. When they install the software, it works with full features for a fixed amount of time. After that, when they try to run it, it tells them their license has expired.
Licensing option that limits the app to run on a particular machine.
Licensing option that limits the app to being run by a particular user.
Licensing option that limits the app to a certain total number of users or concurrent users.
Number one is pretty simple to figure out, but I have no idea how to go about implementing the other three. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
I would look at 3rd party solutions for this honestly. There are a lot of concepts intrinsically involved in licensing, and for the cost of one week of development time you can buy a fully featured licensing product to integrate into your stuff. This is a case where writing your own is probably not worth the hassle.
I've previously used the Desaware licensing system for user and machine based licensing. Works well enough, no complaints. I believe their framework will be robust enough to handle all 4 of your requirements. http://www.desaware.com/products/licensingsystem/index.aspx
All these scnarios can be pretty complicate to implement and get just right (and hassle-free). Instead of wasting your time on this, consider using a commercial licensing solution like CryptoLicensing. It supports all the scenarios you want including trials, machine-locked, user-locked and floating/concurrent.
DISCLAIMER: I work for LogicNP Software, the developers of CryptoLicensing.
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We're currently looking at using the Force.com platform as our development platform and the sales guys and the force.com website are full of reasons why it's the best platform in the world. What I'm looking for, though, is some real disadvantages to using such a platform.
Here are 10 to get you started.
Apex is a proprietary language. Other than the force.com Eclipse plugin, there's little to no tooling available such as refactoring, code analysis, etc.
Apex was modeled on Java 5, which is considered to be lagging behind other languages, and without tooling (see #1), can be quite cumbersome.
Deployment is still fairly manual with lots of gotchas and manual steps. This situation is slowly improving over time, but you'll be disappointed if you're used to having automated deployments.
Apex lacks packages/namespaces. All of your classes, interfaces, etc. live in one folder on the server. This makes code much less organized and class/interface names necessarily long to avoid name clashes and to provide context. This is one of my biggest complaints, and I would not freely choose to build on force.com for this reason alone.
The "force.com IDE", aka force.com eclipse plugin, is incredibly slow. Saving any file, whether it be a class file, text file, etc., usually takes at least 5 seconds and sometimes up to 30 seconds depending on how many objects, data types, class files, etc. are in your org. Saving is also a blocking action, requiring not only compilation, but a full sync of your local project with the server. Orders of magnitude slower than Java or .NET.
The online developer community does not seem very healthy. I've noticed lots of forum posts go unanswered or unsolved. I think this may have something to do with the forum software salesforce.com uses, which seems to suck pretty hard.
The data access DSL in Apex leaves a lot to be desired. It's not even remotely competitive with the likes of (N)Hibernate, JPA, etc.
Developing an app on Apex/VisualForce is an exercise in governor limits engineering. Easily half of programmer time is spent trying to optimize to avoid the numerous governor limits and other gotchas like visualforce view state limits. It could be argued that if you write efficient code to begin with you won't have this problem, which is true to an extent. However there are many times that you have valid reasons to make more than x queries in a session, or loop through more than x records, etc.
The save->compile->run cycle is extremely slow, esp. when it involves zipping and uploading the entire static resource bundle just to do something like test a minor CSS or javascript change.
In general, the pain of a young, fledgling platform without the benefits of it being open source. You have no way to validate and/or fix bugs in the platform. They say to post it to their IdeaExchange. Yeah, good luck with that.
Disclaimers/Disclosures: There are lots of benefits to a hosted platform such as force.com. Force.com does regularly enhance the platform. There are plenty of things about it I like. I make money building on force.com
I see you've gotten some answers, but I would like to reiterate how much time is wasted getting around the various governor limits on the platform. As much as I like the platform on certain levels, I would very strongly, highly, emphatically recommend against it as a general application development platform. It's great as a super configurable and extensible CRM application if that's what you want. While their marketing is exceptional at pushing the idea of Force.com as a general development platform, it's not even remotely close yet.
The efficiency of having a stable platform and avoiding big performance and stability problems is easily wasted in trying to code around the limits that people refer to. There are so many limits to the platform, it becomes completely maddening. These limits are not high-end limits you'll hit once you have a lot of users, you'll hit them almost right away.
While there are usually techniques to get around them, it's very hard to figure out strategies for avoiding them while you're also trying to develop the business logic of your actual application.
To give you a simple sense of how developer un-friendly the environment is, take the "lack of debugging environment" referred to above. It's worse than that. You can only see up to 20 of the most recent requests to the server in the debug logs. So, as you're developing inside the application you have to create a "New" debug request, select your name, hit "Save", switch back to your app, refresh the page, click back to your debug tab, try to find the request that will house your debug log, hit "find" to search for the text you're looking for. It's like ten clicks to look at a debug output. While it may seem trivial, it's just an example of how little care and consideration has been given to the developer's experience.
Everything about the development platform is a grafted-on afterthought. It's remarkable for what it is, but a total PITA for the most part. If you don't know exactly what you are doing (as in you're certified and have a very intimate understanding of Apex), it will easily take you upwards of 10-20x the amount of time that it would in another environment to do something that seems like it would be ridiculously simple, if you can even succeed at all.
The governor limits are indeed that bad. You have a combination of various limits (database queries, rows returned, "script statements", future calls, callouts, etc.) and you have to know exactly what you are doing to avoid these. For example, if you have a calculated rollup "formula" field on an object and you have a trigger on a child object, it will execute the parent object triggers and count those against your limits. Things like that aren't obvious until you've gone through the painful process of trying and failing.
You'll try one thing to avoid one limit, and hit another in a never ending game of "whack a limit". In the process you'll have to drastically re-architect your entire app and approach, as well as rewrite all of your test code. You must have 75% test code coverage to deploy into production, which is actually very good thing, but combined with all of the other limits, it's very burdensome. You'll actually hit governor limits writing your test code that wouldn't come up in normal user scenarios, but that will prevent you from achieving the coverage.
That is not to mention a whole host of other issues. Packaging isn't what you expect. You can't package up your app and deliver it to users without significant user intervention and configuration on the part of the administrator of the org. The AppExchange is a total joke, and they've even started charging 5K just to get your app listed. Importing with the data loader sucks, especially if you have any triggers. You can't export all of your data in one step that includes your relationships in such a way that it can easily be re-imported into another org in a single step (for example a dev org). You can only refresh a sandbox once a month from production, no exceptions, and you can't include your data in a refresh by default unless you have called your account executive to get that feature unlocked. You can't mass delete data in custom objects. You can't change your package names. Certain things can take numerous days to complete after you have requested them, such as a data backup before you want to deploy an app, with no progress report along the way and not much sense of when exactly the export occurred. Given that there are synchronicity issues of data if there are relationships between the data, there are serious data integrity issues in that there is no such thing as a "transaction" that can export numerous objects in a single step. There are probably some commercial tools to facilitate some of this, but these are not within reach to normal developers who may not have a huge budget.
Everything else the other people said here is true. It can take anywhere from five seconds to a minute sometimes to save a file.
I don't mean to be so negative because the platform is very cool in some ways and they're trying to do things in a multi-tenant environment that no one else is doing. It's a very innovative environment and powerful on some levels (I actually like VisualForce a lot), but give it another year or two. They're partnering with VMware, maybe that will lead to giving developers a bit more of a playpen rather than a jail cell to work in.
Here are a few things I can give you after spending a fair bit of time developing on the platform in the last fortnight or so:
There's no RESTful API. They have a soap based API that you can call, but there is no way of making true restful calls
There's no simple way to take their SObjects and convert them to JSON objects.
The visual force pages are ok until you want to customize them and then it's a whole world of pain.
Visual force pages need to be bound to SObjects otherwise there's no way to get the standard input fields like the datepicker or select list to work.
The eclipse plugin is ok if you want to work by yourself, but if you want to work in a large team with the eclipse plugin forget it. It doesn't handle synchronizing to and from the server, it crashes and it isn't really helpful at all.
THERE IS NO DEBUGGER! If you want to debug, it's literally debugged by system.debug statements. This is probably the biggest problem I've found
Their "MVC" model isn't really MVC. It's a lot closer to ASP.NET Webforms. Your views are tightly coupled to not only the models but the controllers as well.
Storing a large number of documents is not feasible. We need to store over 100gb's of documents and we were quoted some ridiculous figure. We've decided to implement our document storage on amazons S3 infrastructure
Even tho the language is java based, it's not java. You can't import any external packages or libraries. Also, the base libraries that are available are severely limited so we've found ourselves implementing a bunch of stuff externally and then exposing those bits as services that are called by force.com
You can call external SOAP or REST based services but the message body is limited to 100kb's so it's very restrictive in what you can call.
In all honesty, whilst there are potential benefits to developing on something like the force.com platform, for me, you couldn't use the force.com platform for true enterprise level apps. At best you could write some basic crud style applications but once you move into anything remotely complicated I'd be avoiding it like the plague.
Wow- there's a lot here that I didn't even know were limitations - after working on the platform for a few years.
But just to add some other things...
The reason you don't have a line-by-line debugger is precisely because it's a multi-tenant platform. At least that's what SFDC says - it seems like in this age of thread-rich programming, that isn't much of an excuse, but that's apparently the reason. If you have to write code, you have "System.debug(String)" as your debugger - I remember having more sophisticated server debugging tools in Java 1.2 about 12 years ago.
Another thing I really hate about the system is version control. The Spring framework is not used for what Spring is usually used for - it's really more off a configuration tool in SFDC rather than version control. SFDC provides ZERO version-control.
You can find yourself stuck for days doing something that should seem so ridiculously easy, like, say, scheduling a SFDC report to export to a CSV file and email to a list of recipients... Well, about the easiest way to do that is create a custom object with a custom field, with a workflow rule and a Visualforce email template... and then for code you need to write a Visualforce component that streams the report data to the Visualforce email template as an attachment and you write anonymous APEX code schedule field-update of the custom object... For SFDC developers, this is almost a daily task... trying to put about five different technologies together to do tasks that seem so simple.... And this can cause management headaches and tensions too - Typically, you'd find this out after getting a suggestion to do something that doesn't work in the user-community (like someone already said), and then trying many things that, after you developed them you'd find they just don't work for some odd-ball reason - like "you can't schedule a VisualForce page", or "you can't call getContent from a schedulable context" or some other arcane reason.
There are so many, many maddening little gotcha's on the SFDC platform, that once you know WHY they're there, it makes sense... but they're still very bad limitations that keep you from doing what you need to do. Here's some of mine;
You can't get record owner information "out of the box" on pretty much any kind of record - you have to write a trigger that links the owner on create of the record to the record you're inserting. Why? Short answer because an owner can be either a "person" or a "queue", and the two are drastically different entities... Makes sense, but it can turn a project literally upside down.
Maddening security model. Example: "Manage Public Reports" permission is vastly different from "Create and Customize Reports" and that basically goes for everything on the platform... especially folders of any kind.
As mentioned, support is basically non-existent. If you are an extremely self-sufficient individual, or have a lot of SFDC resources, or have a lot of time and/or a very forgiving manager, or are in charge of a SFDC system that's working fine, you're in pretty good shape. If you are not in any of these positions, you can find yourself in deep trouble.
SFDC is a very seductive business proposition... no equipment footprint, pretty good security, fixed price, no infrastructure, AND you get web-based CRM with batchable, and schedualble processing... But as the other posters said, it is really quite a ramp-up in development learning, and if you go with consulting, I think the lowest price I've seen was $200/hour.
Salesforce tends integrate with other things years after some technologies become common-place - JSON and jquery come to mind... and if you have other common infrastructures that you want to do an integration with, like JIRA, expect to pay a lot extra, and they can be quite buggy.
And as one of the other posters mentioned, you are constantly fighting governor limits that can just drive you nuts... an attachment can NOT be > 5MB. Period. And sometimes < 3MB (if base64 encoded). Ten HTTP callouts in a class. Period. There are dozens of published governor limits, and many that are not which you will undoubtedly find and just want to run out of your office screaming.
I really, REALLY like the platform, but trust me - it can be one really cruel mistress.
But in fairness to SFDC, I'd say this: the biggest problem I find with the platform is not the platform itself, but the gargantuan expectations that almost anyone who sees the platform, but hasn't developed on it has.... and those people tend to be in positions of great authority in business organizations; marketing, sales, management, etc. Huge disconnects occur and heads roll, or are threatened to roll daily - all because there's this great platform out there with weird gotchas and thousands of people struggling daily to get their heads around why things should just work when they just don't and won't.
EDIT:
Just to add to lomaxx's comments about the MVC; In SFDC terminology, this is closely related to what's known as the "viewstate" -- aand it can be really buggy, in that what is on the VF page is not what is in the controller-class for the page. So, you have to go throught weird gyrations to synch whats on the page with what the controller is going to write to SF when you click your "save" button (or make your HTTP callout or whatever).... man, it's annoying.
I think other people have covered the disadvantages in more depth but to me, it doesn't seem to use the MVC paradigm or support much in the way of code reuse at all. To do anything beyond simple applications is an exercise in frustration compared to developing an application using something like ASP.Net MVC.
Furthermore, the tools, the data layer and the frustration of trying to refactor code or rename fields during the development process doesn't help.
I think as a CMS it's pretty cool but as a platform for non CMS applications, it's doesn't make sense to me.
The security model is also very very restrictive... but this isn't the worst part. You can't currently assert whether a user has the ability to perform a particular action.
You can check to see what their role is, but you can't check if that role has permissions to perform the current action.
Even worse is the response from tech support to "try the action and if there's an exception, catch it"
Considering Force.com is a "cloud" platform, its ability to act as a client to an external WSDL-defined service is pretty underwhelming. See http://force201.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/when-generate-from-wsdl-fails-hand-coding-web-service-calls/ for what you might end up having to do.
To all above, I am curious how the release of VMforce, allowing Java programmer to write code for Force.com, changes the disadvantages above?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/vmforcecom-redefines-the-paas-landscape/1071
I guess they are trying to address these issues. At dreamforce they mentioned they we're trying to drop the Governor limits to only 4. I'm not sure what the details are. They have a REST API for early access, and they bought heroku which is a ruby development in the cloud. They split out the database, with database.com so you can do all your web development on and your db calls using database.com.
I guess they are trying to make it as agnostic as possible. But right about now these are all announcements and early access so like their Safe Harbor statements don't purchase on what they say, only on what they currently have.
I know this is not a programming question per se, but I wanted to get as much input from the SO community on a new project I hope to get started. The project is from being started from scratch and thus every decision for programming languages, databases, frameworks, platforms and what not are up in the air. I'm hoping to get your opinion on the matter, what you feel are the strengths and weaknesses of each option.
Database:
Currently I have the option of using MSSQL or MySQL. While I am leaning towards using MySQL because it is free and most probably has all the features I need. However, there is the possibility of having a lot of hierarchical data and the new hierarchical data type in MSSQL is quite appealing. Does it really simplify matters that much? Also MSSQL supports many more advanced SQL functions that may or may not be useful in the long run. While for development I can get access to Server 2008, multiple licenses as the development team grows and for production, are the costs justified?
Programming Languages:
The project will have a web based front end UI and a server based component that will do some heavy lifting.
For the web based UI, I was thinking of maybe doing Apache/IIS with PHP or IIS with ASP.Net in C#. I'd like to use a good framework to properly utilize good design patterns that should structure the code and development of the app. As well as make modifications in the long run easy to implement. I also want the GUI to look good and don't like the idea of buying .Net controls from component vendors. Instead I prefer the idea of using good CSS, and open sources like YUI and javascript to make the UI sleek.
For the server based component, I was thinking of using C#. I have no real development experience in C++ and I'd like good libraries and sufficient speed is good enough. However, while the web based UI and server based component is loosely coupled, there may be instances where the UI needs to communicate (call methods and what not) with the server based component and I want to pick languages/frameworks that will play nice with each other.
All suggestions on frameworks to incorporate are welcome.
Version Control:
I have had good experiences with SVN and a pretty bad experiences with TFS. I've never worked with GIT. Which do you think is better in terms of features as well as general developer familiarity. I want to pick something that other developers will know and not have trouble with.
I apologize if the questions are bit redundant or I'm not providing enough information or using bad terminology. I plan to edit and improve the question as I get feedback. Thanks!
EDIT:
Who: This would most probably be a startup formed of college students or junior developers. I want the project to utilize technologies that most people are familiar with or are easy to pick up.
What: I'd need hours and days to explain the solution. But in the end when you break it down, its a web based UI (think standard web app to just manage database data) that would be used to knowledgeable clients. The server based component would be very separate except for the fact that it should be able to communicate with the web app.
I can provide more information as required but I would appreciate an opportunity for users to answer and provide their ideas before you hastily close the question.
Obviously it depends a lot on specific requirements, but then again, even with those I probably wouldn't be able to tell for sure!
I've been working on a from-scratch project myself for a couple of months, and have generally found:
Choosing Microsoft for all the layers just goes down much easier (my subjective opinion). For example I would use C# for the UI, the back end, and use MSSQL for the database. Nothing at all wrong with non-Microsoft vendors, I'm no Microsoft fan-boy, I just struggle to get productive with unfamiliar tools. Depends where your experience lies though.
Database: In particular I've found that .NET and MSSQL go easily together. When I started the project I was using a PostgreSQL (because it's free, fully featured and has open-source warm fuzzies). However I abandoned it in favour of MSSQL simply because it was taking me too long to get database work done in an unfamiliar language with unfamiliar tools. Also, I'm not sure MSSQL is so expensive anymore, for example for a web application, MSSQL 2008 Web Edition is pretty damn cheap per-processor I think (only on SPLA licensing though). If you're concerned about database features in a free implementation though, personally I think PostgreSQL has a very full feature set, nicely standardised, and rapidly growing.
UI: I'm pretty inexperienced, but ASP.NET MVC looks far less painful to me than ASP.NET Web Forms. I like PHP too, but again I'd match the UI language with the back-end language, so would recommend .NET.
On frameworks, I'm immersed in DALs at the moment. I like Subsonic for lightweight data, NHibernate for heavy-weight.
I still have a long way to go with my project so perhaps I can only see the short-term benefits and drawbacks at the moment. But in general I would say: use the technologies that you're most comfortable using, as you'll be way more productive and the end result will probably be about the same anyway. If you want to learn new technologies though, and who doesn't? - go ahead, just expect it to take a lot longer.
Didn't want to answer 'cause it's so open ended. But a few points:
Money
First, check out BizSpark. That should take care of any money aspect for 3 years. For a service company, that means not only free VS Team Suite and Office and so on, but free Windows, SQL, etc. If your startup can't afford to spend a bit on MS tech in 3 years, it's probably a bad business. So that takes out licensing.
On a similar note, Sun has Startup Essentials. Could be interesting on the hardware side of things, but I haven't actually competitively priced them versus Dell/HP.
Software
It doesn't sound like you have hard enough requirements to say "oh, this slightly-less-popular software X is perfect for my domain Y and is gonna give me a very big boost". In fact, your project might not be like that at all. Maybe it, technically, is going to be a relatively plain application just pushing data around or whatever. You didn't specify.
For a small startup, personal productivity is probably going to trump any other argument. If your people are excellent in X, then that's one of your top arguments right there.
If you really don't have any particular system you're most comfortable with, be conservative. Stick with .NET or Java, as they'll give you the widest range of useful possibilities.
As far as things like OS and Database, I'm biased, but I think Microsoft will give you platforms that are easier to take advantage of than you'll find elsewhere. For instance, setting up load balancing, clustering, centralized authentication, managing servers (updates, events, etc.) is going to be easier to get going on Windows than it would be on another platform, assuming you're not an expert in either. Configuring SQL Server, even the advanced features, is a piece of cake. (Go time someone who knows neither: Setup a DB mirror in MSSQL and MySQL -- which is going to take more work?) Again, this is all predicated on you not having experts in a particular set of technology.
Don't mix -- whatever you do, stick with the platform. If you go .NET, MSSQL is going to work better with the data providers (or things like Linq-to-SQL). If you decide to do PHP, then use MySQL as everyone else uses it and you'll encounter less resistance. If you're not inventing stuff on the technical side, don't become an edge case.
You should pick the platform first, then the language that is best for that platform (if there is any choice).
One thing you should consider is the labor pool, and labor pool cost, for specific platforms and languages. Human Resources can often get cost metrics, if you don't have ideas already.
In my town, for example, .NET platform is much more expensive per Software Engineer than open source, because the .NET developers have a higher rate (40% roughly). C# is a little higher rate than VB.NET, but also tends to bring more well rounded candidates.
Just to throw in something totally different: How about weblocks as a web framework? It uses Hunchentoot as a server, which can run either standalone or with Apache. This is all done in Common Lisp. Weblocks can use cl-sql as a backend store, which can connect to many different RDBMs (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ODBC, SQLite).
Our company has a point of sale system with many extras, such as ordering and receiving functionality, sales and order history etc. Our main issue is that the system was not designed properly from the ground up, so it takes too long to make fixes and handle requests from our customers. Also, the current technology we are using (Progress database, Progress 4GL for the language) incurs quite a bit of licensing expenses on our customers due to mutli-user license fees for database connections etc.
After a lot of discussion it is looking like we will probably start over from scratch (while maintaining the current product at least for the time being). We are looking for a couple of things:
Create the system with a nice GUI front end (it is currently CHUI and the application was not built in a way that allows us to redesign the front end... no layering or separation of business logic and gui...shudder).
Create the system with the ability to modularize different functionality so the product doesn't have to include all features. This would keep the cost down for our current customers that want basic functionality and a lower price tag. The bells and whistles would be available for those that would want them.
Use proper design patterns to make the product easy to add or change any part at any time (i.e. change the database or change the front end without needing to rewrite the application or most of it). This is a problem today because the Progress 4GL code is directly compiled against the database. Small changes in the database requires lots of code recompiling.
Our new system will be Linux based, with a possibility of a client application providing functionality from one or more windows boxes.
So what I'm looking for is any suggestions on which database and/or framework or programming language(s) someone might recommend for this sort of product. Anyone that has experience in this field might be able to point us in the right direction or even have some ideas of what to avoid. We have considered .NET and SQL Express (we don't need an enterprise level DB), but that would limit us to windows (as far as I know anyway). I have heard of Mono for writing .NET code in a Linux environment, but I don't know much about it yet. We've also considered a Java and MySql based implementation.
To summarize we are looking to do the following:
Keep licensing costs down on the technology we will use to develop the product (Oracle, yikes! MySQL, nice.)
Deliver a solution that is easily maintainable and supportable.
A solution that has a component capable of running on "old" hardware through a CHUI front end. (some of our customers have 40+ terminals which would be a ton of cash in order to convert over to a PC).
Suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks
[UPDATE]
I should note that we are currently performing a total cost analysis. This question is intended to give us a couple of "educated" options to look into to include in or analysis. Anyone who could share experiences/suggestions about client/server setups would be appreciated (not just those who have experience with point of sale systems... that would just be a bonus).
[UPDATE]
For anyone who is interested, we ended up going with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, LS Retail (a plugin for the point of sale and various other things) and then did some (and are currently working on) customization work on top of that. This setup gave us the added benefit of having a fully integrated g/l system, which our current system lacked.
Java for language (or Scala if you want to be "bleeding edge", depending on how you plan to support it and what your developers are like it might be better, but also worse)
H2 for database
Swing for GUI
Reason: Free, portable and pretty standard.
Update: Missed the part where the system should be a client-server setup. My assumption was that the database and client should run on the same machine.
I suggest you first research your constraints a bit more - you made a passing reference to a client using a particular type of terminal - this may limit your options, unless the client agrees to upgrade.
You need to do a lot more legwork on this. It's great to get opinions from web forums, but we can't possibly know your environment as well as you do.
My broad strokes advice would be to aim for technology that is widely used. This way, expertise on the platform is cheaper than "niche" technologies, and it will be easier to get help if you hit a brick wall. Of course, following this advice may not be possible if you have non-negotiable technology already in place at customers.
My second suggestion would be to complete a full project plan, with detailed specs and proper cost estimates, before going with the "rewrite from scratch" option. Right now, you're saying that it would be cheaper to rewrite the system than maintain it, and you don't really know how much it would cost to re-write.
I suggest you use browser for the UI.
Organize your application as a web application.
There are tons of options for the back-end. You can use Java + MySQL. Java backend will save you from windows/linux debate as it will run on both platforms. You won't have any licensing cost for both Java and MySQL. (Edit: Definitely there are a lot of others languages that have run-times for both linux & windows including PHP, Ruby, Python etc)
If you go this route, you may also want to consider Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for creating the browser based front-end in a modular fashion.
One word of caution though. Browsers can be pesky when it comes to memory management. In our experience, this was the most significant challenge in doing browser based POS You may want to checkout Adobe Flex that runs in browser but might be more civil in its memory management.
What is CHUI? Character-UI, as in VT terminals? Or even 3270 style?
It sounds like you need a 3-tier system - the database backend, a middle-layer that runs the bulk of the back-end business processes, and a front-end layer for the CHUI / GUI / data-gateway.
All three layers can reside on one machine; or you can distribute the tiers out to various servers. The front-end layer would control the actual terminals, whether they are VT-terminals, or a web-browser, or a custom-written 'client' application.
Make sure you have considered the hardware needs here -- are you going to have barcode scanners, cash drawers, POS debit/credit terminals, et cetra? If you are using a standard browser, it might be hard to reliably integrate those items. (At the very least, you're likely going to have to write special applets to handle them.)
Finally, consider the possibility of a thin-client technology on Windows. It greatly simplifies system management, since you only have to upgrade the software centrally. Thin-client PC's are cheap -- sub $200.
Golden Code Development (see www.goldencode.com) has a technology that does automated conversion of Progress 4GL (the schema and code... the entire application) to a Java application with a relational database backend (e.g. PostgreSQL). They currently support a very complete CHUI environment and they do refactor the code. For example, the conversion separates the UI, the data model and the business logic into separate Java classes. The entire result is a drop-in replacement that is compatible with the original (users don't need retraining, processes don't need to be modified, the data is migrated too). This is possible because they provide an application server and a set of runtime classes that provide that compatibility. The result of the automated conversion is not something that needs further editing before you can compile and run it. True terminal support is included so hardware terminals still work (it requires a small JNI library to access NCURSES from Java). All the rest of the code in the runtime is pure Java. No Progress Software Corp technology is used in the resulting system and it runs on Linux.
At least one converted system is already in production, running a 24 by 7 mission critical environment. It is a converted ERP system that their mid-sized pilot customer uses to run their entire business.