How good is the development software you use?

What platform(s) are you creating this software under? What license will you be using? These are important questions for some of the people on this site, we may not be in your target market as we're Linux users.

For MySQL database management I use the MySQL command-line client over SSH. There's nothing bad about it for dba style tasks, it's simple and works. Occassionally I want to have a rich client that can display large result sets better, in this case I use the MySQL Query Browser. It seems to work perfectly fine. Haven't got any complaints, but then I don't often use it! There's also the MySQL Administrator, which can help with dba tasks.

FTP (using a GUI) under Linux could definately be improved upon, there's only one option called: gFTP. It's lacking a few features and sometimes crashes. Although they're just minor annoyances, certainly not enough to make me use a proprietary tool--or worse--go back to Windows!

BKuhlOrElse wrote: I'm talking about web software written in PHP

If this is an answer to the platform question, I meant will it work on Windows, Linux, and Mac (or any combination of these)?

As it won't be Free (as in freedom) I would never use it anyway. I have one editor that works for everything, Haskell through to C to PHP, I regard it as a royal pain to switch specialised editors every time I switch languages and that's Vim. It's probably the editor with the steepest learning curve, but the things that can be done with it are astounding.

Looks like I'm not in your target market really!

I am aware of some of the competition you'll have in the PHP editor market: Zend Studio and Komodo. Are they able to do the same things you're proposing? There may well be some merit in integrating everything (scripting, FTP, database access) into one product.

BKhulOrElse wrote: However the only software we've really used is PHPMyAdmin to manage our databases.

Seems this is the software most people use to manage their databases. It follows the Open Source mantra of: 'Do one thing, and do it well.' There are also the tools I mentioned above (MySQL Administrator and Query Browser) and third-party tools such as: Navicat, or Webyog. Those are the ones I've heard of/tried to use at one time or another.

We're not writing a PHP editor... we're writing Database Management software such as PHPMyAdmin with enhanced features, better design, and additional tools for webmasters to manage their programmers/graphic designers and their web sites.

I appreciate the links to those other database management scripts. I"ll be taking a look at them.

BKuhlOrElse wrote: We're not writing a PHP editor... we're writing Database Management software such as PHPMyAdminp

Ooops! Entirely my mistake. I read your reply incorrectly.

Thinking about things I dislike about phpMyAdmin: -

• Cluttered.
• No AJAX.
• Not Web Standards compliant.
• Looks pretty ugly.
• High learning curve for new users.

So if I were you, I'd be thinking of creating a very clean interface that uses AJAX to send SQL requests and recieve the resultsets. That would be nice, and would use less bandwidth.

In common use of MySQL I typically create new users, assign permissions and create new databases. Occassionally I do SELECT queries, usually to see what users are in the database.

Probably best is to concentrate on getting a great-looking design, that's immediately comfortable to use, with AJAX for most operations. Don't worry too much about features, that's one area where I don't believe you can compete with phpMyAdmin. Just try doing something different, for a different market.

Does that help?

Nearly forgot, the graphical tools for MySQL management I'm aware of are:

• MySQL Query Browser/MySQL Administrator
• Navicat
• Webyog

None of them are web-based however, the only one I know of that is: phpMyAdmin. Which you already know about.