so heres the skinny, i just finished a year long java course and i can program in java. at the hospital that i volunteer at there is a little library (prolly 200+ books) and two computers runing win7 with internets access. my volunteer coordinator mentioned to me today that she needs someone to upgrade the current system they have for checking out books which is currently done just by manually entering the data into a spreadsheet on one of the computers. though really, that hardly qualifies as a system. so i thought i should try to write a small java program or applet that would act as the library catalog and system for checking out books. but being totally a noob to computers and programming in general, im not sure about a few things:
[ol]
[li]Im guessing there is no full-time IT guy (i forgot to ask her), but there must be an admin that at least installed the desktops. if there is a password for file permissions or something, ill obviously have to send an email to the admin (if there is an official admin). but if there isnt a password, should i notify the admin that i am planning to install a custom java application? whats the etiquette here?[/li]
[li]I'd like both computers to share the same database, so the borrower could check out books from either computer (which is not the case currently), so how do i make that happen? its windows so can i just place the database in the shared folder or do i need to take advantage of tcp sockets to get the computers to communicate?[/li]
[li]Should i have two synchronized databases, or should i put the database on one pc and then get the other pc to interact with that database (via tcp sockets or something)?[/li]
[li]Or since there is only like 200books and it doesnt really seem like i need a database, should i rather simply have the java program write to an xml text file[/li]
[li]Or since im even asking these questions, am i probably not capable of doing this and should forget about the whole thing?[/li][/ol]
ive only just started reading about networking, so my questions might not even make sense, but i thought i would query my fellow escapists nonetheless for their shrewd advice.
[ol]
[li]Im guessing there is no full-time IT guy (i forgot to ask her), but there must be an admin that at least installed the desktops. if there is a password for file permissions or something, ill obviously have to send an email to the admin (if there is an official admin). but if there isnt a password, should i notify the admin that i am planning to install a custom java application? whats the etiquette here?[/li]
[li]I'd like both computers to share the same database, so the borrower could check out books from either computer (which is not the case currently), so how do i make that happen? its windows so can i just place the database in the shared folder or do i need to take advantage of tcp sockets to get the computers to communicate?[/li]
[li]Should i have two synchronized databases, or should i put the database on one pc and then get the other pc to interact with that database (via tcp sockets or something)?[/li]
[li]Or since there is only like 200books and it doesnt really seem like i need a database, should i rather simply have the java program write to an xml text file[/li]
[li]Or since im even asking these questions, am i probably not capable of doing this and should forget about the whole thing?[/li][/ol]
ive only just started reading about networking, so my questions might not even make sense, but i thought i would query my fellow escapists nonetheless for their shrewd advice.