O$ : Is it possible to write a app with Omnis and give it away for free

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

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On 24/04/09 12:42 AM, Rainer Greim wrote:
> Hi Jim and all the others,
> so no chance for Omnis . Sad to hear that..
> Q: How do you make a fat client gui in php ? Till now I only know PHP is
> good for web , scripting and other nice thngs...
> If have some stuf with perl and tcl/tk for the gui. But I dont want to
> use tcl/tc for my app.
> So I wiil go into the forrest to catch the fox again. Btw. have a look
> at www.promatrix.com and see by yourself what you get for some euros to
> make a desktop app..

PHP is really not suitable for making fat-client apps. I'd argue that
it's not especially suitable for making any kind of app, but that's
another issue and no, I'm not interested in debating the merits, or lack
thereof, of PHP. You can use wxPython, PyQt, PyGTK, or Mozilla XUL to
build free, in every sense of the word, rich-client apps. Having said
that, I don't see the wisdom of making this a fat-client app at all.
Make it a web app from the outset. That doesn't necessarily mean you
need to have Internet access or anything more complicated than a
notebook computer running Windows, OS X, or Linux. You could build an
app such as you described in a matter of a day with Django
<http://djangoproject.com>, deploy on your notebook with SQLite, and
then upload the data to a web site once you return from the tournament
so that everyone can see the results. Packaging Python apps for
deployment isn't especially difficult, certainly no more so than
packaging Omnis apps.

I don't understand why it surprises you that Omnis is not suitable for
writing free apps. It's a proprietary development tool which requires
you to purchase a runtime license to deploy your work. Whether that
license is cheap or expensive, it's not free. If you can figure out how
to "give away the razors but make money on the blades", you have a
viable business model. Then, you might be able to justify Omnis. Even if
you had a viable business model, I'd still be inclined to build a web
application in which case, Omnis is automatically disqualified since it
has nothing to offer anyone who doesn't already have a dependency on
Omnis (and even then, I'd take a hard look at at something else). There
are much better options for web development.

This <http://www.teamsnap.com/> is geared for team sports so I don't
know if you can bend it to fit your situation.
- --
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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