[DUG] Software and how to go forward

[Tony Blomfield]

How right you are. Particularly in the .NET world, nothing ever gets finished. Software businesses are just there for developer Guru’s to tinker and play with the latest tools.
From: delphi-bounces at listserver.123.net.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at listserver.123.net.nz] On Behalf Of Jolyon Direnko-Smith
Sent: Thursday, 3 December 2015 9:35 a.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: Re: [DUG] Software and how to go forward

Hi Wallace,

First I find it interesting that a PDF is filled in but then posted.  Did you mean emailed ?  Or is there a paper form involved ?

If it's a paper form then some sort of OCR solution might be feasible; if it's an emailed PDF form then if it is an actual "form" then there is presumably a PDF forms API you might be able to use to extract the information.

Robo's idea is potentially a good one. Although instead of/as well as a web page for them to provide membership details, have you thought about a mobile app ?  It strikes me that the social/community dimension of clubs with events etc would be ideally suited to some sort of mobile app.


In terms of simply streamlining the data processing you have currently, a lot will come down to the scale of the problem and whether the effort in implementing, deploying and maintaining any solution would be recouped in the saved effort of keying the data received currently.  You call this "Dark ages", but one of the biggest problems afflicting the software development industry is a perpetual perception of a need to change just for the sake of being "new".


If homes were built in the same way as software we would knock down perfectly good homes every few years just because the tools used to build them are now a few years old, regardless of the state of the buildings themselves.

On 2 December 2015 at 22:59, Marshland Engineering <marshland at marshland.co.nz<mailto:marshland at marshland.co.nz>> wrote:
I have written a program using Delphi and MySQL to keep track of our club
members, subs, events that they take part in etc etc, however, at some events,
we need a lot of info and each entrant needs to fill out 20 or so fields of
data and pay some money.

Currently they fill in a PDF form and post it to us. (Dark ages) Needless to
say this is hugely time consuming. What is the easiest and reasonably
comprehensive way to go ? Looks like I'm in for learning a new language here.

Thanks Wallace.



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