Whats the best approach to building a lightweight database app?
I’d very, very strongly advise against the java approach. I have a similarly underpowered machine running Azureus inside a VNC instance and it regularly brings the machine to its knees. The micro-webserver implementation could be done very simply either in PHP or any other web framework (Rails is great for rapid development, Django is good too, camping if you want a brainfsck in the process). I’d recommend skipping firefox as the browser-end and looking at something like Gaelon or whatever they’re calling it today, much lighter weight. I’m sort of assuming that you’re doing this on either a pro-bono basis or as a favor, because otherwise the labor costs would dwarf what even the cheapeste Dell would cost. If this isn’t the case, it’s probably cheaper and certainly easier to just go with a Dell and QuickBooks or similar.
