[fpc-pascal] Developing a mini ERP / web based development

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019, Darius Blaszyk wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have been asked to write a limited functionality / mini ERP type of software for an NGO that is setting up a hospital. I'm doing this in my own time and free of charge. The compiler and IDE of choice are of course FreePascal & Lazarus. I’m still thinking about the direction to go exactly with this and I was hoping to get some feedback/support from the community here as I always have gotten over the years.
> 
> The hardware of choice is already made and will be a network of several
> Chromebooks on which all staff will be logging in the system.  This made
> me think that a desktop application is less feasible and I should look at
> a web-based solution.  I found some frameworks such as ExtPascal, fano,
> Brook, pas2js.  Unfortunately, I don't know much about web-based
> applications.  So my question is whether any of the frameworks are mature
> enough to create a database driven application as described.  Possibly
> there are other frameworks available that I don't know of but are worth
> investigating?

ExtPascal was a dead end and is now effectively dead (unless I am
misinformed).

I can't inform you about fano.

As for the others:

Brook & Pas2js are definitely worth investigating.

Brook is a long-standing server platform for FPC.

pas2js is used as the basis for TMS Web Core (a commercial product for
Delphi/lazarus. pas2js is meanwhile very mature. (I use it myself extensively :))
You must use this if you wish to include a lot of browser-side
functionality.

If it is for charity, you could try getting a TMS Web core license for free.
Programming then becomes like creating a desktop program; drag&drop.

For server-side database Access, there is sqldbRestBridge. 
It is fairly new, but is scheduled to be included in TMS WEB core.

You can also simply program using fcl-web: simple HTTP request/response. 
All the others are based on top of it, if I am correct.

If you use bare-bones fcl-web, it's a bit like PHP: you always generate the
full HTML on the server.

Doubtlessly, there are other frameworks to work with. I work with the above
ones (and developed 3 our of 4 :)) so I am of course giving a biased view...

Michael.