Building a data gathering software!

Question

Hello,
First of all, I'm really glad to be part of this awesome community!
Second, I'm just in need of some guidance regarding my study thesis (Im a pharmacy student).
Basically I'm in need of a simple software that does the following job:
*have an entry field that auto-complete from a database of meds.
*when the value is entered it will be saved daily to .txt file.
So my question: is it hard to build such software? & which languages should I dive in to achieve it?
thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This is super easy and it should take you only a few hours to figure out if you're a complete beginner.

The languages will depend on your needs. If you want to use a website, you can use HTML, css, javascript, Ajax, php and MySQL.

You won't need to learn everything about the languages, just enough to know what you're doing. If you need a basic program to do this, I'd recommend d just learning and using python. It's easier to learn and has a lot of capabilities. I'm a web specialist so I tend to use web languages for most of my tools but each language has its own benefits.

For sending the data to a text file, that's as simple as opening and writing to a .txt file from the data stored in the database. You could even write a cron job to execute a script to do that for you everyday at a certain time if your pharmacy really needs that.

Answer 2

Thanks for the detailed explanation man! I really appreciate it! I gonna work with +6 pharmacies to do a proper research, and some of them won't have internet, therefore I might go with python as you suggested.

About the .txt database, I just thought it easier to save rather then other formats.

Thanks again and I'll start learning python right now! cheers!

Answer 3

No problem. That's why I'm here. Good luck and update us on the project! We'd love to hear how it goes!