This is going to be a long, rambling post...

I have a large record collection, you know - those 12" vinyl things before CDs

Several years ago, I started to try to get it set-up on Lotus Approach, but just never got around to taking the time to learn it properly... Anyway, my record collection is now just a large Excel spreadsheet - with artist name, album title, record label, number, condition, where bought, date bought, cost, etc, etc.

It serves my purposes, but I always wanted to setup a nice input/update screen that would access my albums and I could browse thru my albums, and add/update, print reports, etc. I also have MS Access, but I have been resistant to learning it.... actually, I just don't want to learn it at all.

A long time ago I wrote a simple COBOL program that would read a Lotus spreadsheet printed file (printfile.prn) and would print nice statements automatically. But thats old stuff, I want to learn the new ways of doing things.

I'm getting ready to jump into learning Java, as discussed in the other post - Java book recommendations. So I was wondering if something could be set up with Java. I don't care about speed, or that stuff. I just want to try something that would teach me things. I was wondering if I could design screens in Java that would let me access my album file. Also, would the data file be the same Excel file that already exists, or would it have to be a newly created file...?

At first I was gonna use VB6 to setup this system, but I decided to blowoff learning VB any further. I just completed an Intro course at my college in VB6 - an easy A+.

I have recently started my Intro to Databases course, and my textbook came with Oracle 9i. I wonder if this system could be setup with Oracle, but I know nothing about oracle yet - we won't get into any oracle until later in the course.

I told you this post would be rambling... Well, to sum it all up, I just want to computerize my album collection, and be able to scroll thru my collection with computer screens, and get various reports, and all that good stuff.

Oracle would be rather overkill for your intended purpose.

Have you searched sourceforge or freshmeat for an already working solution?

I want this to be a learning project, so even though I am sure there are many free, or cheap programs for collecting hobbies, I want to do something myself as a learning project.

My Db textbook came with a version of Oracle that is a student edition, or personal edition, or whatever its called.

I also collect Roman coins, and I have a program written by a programmer that has all sorts of input screens, and you can import images of the obverse & reverse of the coins, and get various printouts, etc. Very nice. He wrote it for Windoze, I think he wrote it in some Borland thing... (He told me he's learning linux now, cause he hates MS's marketing tactics).

So the question is, can Java do something like this, or is it not really for this type of thing ?

Also, this will have to be on a win2k machine at least for awhile, until I hook up my mandrake 9.0 machine at a later date. So something that would work on multi-platform would be good.

Java could definately do this if your data was in an Oracle database. It probably could if it was an excel spreadsheet - but I've never tried that so I couldn't comment - maybe do a search for Java excel on google?

Edit: this may be useful once you've learned basic Java and JDBC - it seems that it is possible http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/...824-excel2.html

Edit#2: The third option in the above link seems best - try importing the spreadsheet into a database - could be access or - better still - MySQL, Oracle etc...

Ok from your other threads i see that you are learning java anyway so java is probably the best thing for you.

Another option is php-gtk
http://gtk.php.net/
it's cross platform, and is relatively quick to code, and it is easy to connect to mysql/pgsql databases (you can connect to oracle via ODBC) as php comes with database drivers.
But then i am php biased.

I would say go with java as thats what you are learning, but be prepared to do a lot of learning/coding.

I looked at that link, and it looks like it would do it fine.

However, I'm too old to try to learn too many things :(

I decided I want to learn just one O-O language, and I choose Java. There are a few other things I'd like to learn, such as making a nice website (I know a little HTML but that's it). So I'd like to learn php and a couple of other things.

Too bad I'm already old though. You may remember the classic thread "20 Years Wasted...." awhile back where I complained about wasting 20 years as a bkkpr/accountant, when my real interest has always been computers. So now I'm over 40, and just starting to learn linux, O-O, web design, etc.

You don't need to learn PHP to learn to do decent websites - if you're learning Java anyway then you should look at JSP - far more powerful because they are basically Java classes - but the y look like HTML!