We have a very small company that develops complete operation applications for forms printing companies. One of our applications collects production information for job cost history and job tracking. The application has been in use for a very long time (started back in the days of DOS) and has used low end PC's as the collection device because the PC was less expensive and more versatile than the data collection devices on the market. That is still the case today so we have never considered the normal data collection devices as a good alternative. Times have changed though and we are thinking that smart-phones would be a very good alternative based on the fact that most people already have one so purchase prices would not be a problem. They are also portable and will always be available even as personal move around in their duties.
My question is: Is B4A the best way to develop the described app based on the following facts and requirements.
Our background is in windows development using VB6, DBASE(third party database library) and SQL databases. We are wondering about the learning curve to use B4A as we have no experience with smart-phone development at all.
Be able to read 3 of 9 Extended bar-codes ( only need to read )
Read and write text files to and from a Windows network folder. I think text (or maybe XML) would be easier to work with as whatever we do has to be interfaced to both a SQL database and a DBF database and we have the expertise to import and export to those easily. Email or messaging could be used for this if doing so would be a lot easier.
Thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Mikel Giles
My question is: Is B4A the best way to develop the described app based on the following facts and requirements.
Our background is in windows development using VB6, DBASE(third party database library) and SQL databases. We are wondering about the learning curve to use B4A as we have no experience with smart-phone development at all.
Be able to read 3 of 9 Extended bar-codes ( only need to read )
Read and write text files to and from a Windows network folder. I think text (or maybe XML) would be easier to work with as whatever we do has to be interfaced to both a SQL database and a DBF database and we have the expertise to import and export to those easily. Email or messaging could be used for this if doing so would be a lot easier.
Thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Mikel Giles