Free software to use as aircraft register with photos

Question

I'm sure there's a name for software of this kind, but Google hasn't been particularly helpful.

I'm looking for online, self-hosted software that will generate a database/spreadsheet table with columns of my own design. I want to make a searchable table of aircraft registrations and details of the aircraft and owners. If I need to design the DB tables beforehand and the software simply connects to it, that's also fine.

It would be great if I could link pictures to each record, perhaps after a user clicks on an aircraft in the list, the most recent pictures could be shown.

I'm looking for something more user-friendly than phpMyAdmin or other similar DB frontends, that can support multiple users, ideally on Linux.

Answer 1

If you want more control and flexibility than possible in an online spreadsheet such as Google Sheets, you'll need to dabble in database app development.

4D & FileMaker

These two products are combo app development platform plus database serve that help you define a table (or multiple tables in 4D, as it is a relational database), and then allow either a client app or web browser to connect to enter data and view data:

• 4D
• FileMaker

If you have a single list of records, use FileMaker. If you have multiple related tables (lists), use 4D. Both know how to store pictures.

Sounds like you have at least two tables: aircraft and photos, where each photo belongs to a particular airplane.

Separate programming language and database

You can try software development using a programming language separated from the database engine. Much more complicated than FileMaker/4D but you get any even more control.

For example, use the Vaadin framework to write a server-side web app in pure Java that is automatically rendered in web-standards technology in a web browser without you having to learn HTTP, HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, WebSockets, etc. See this demo example of presenting images/pictures, and press the "i" button for links to documentation.

Store the data in a database such as H2 or Postgres connected via JDBC.

Another possible toolset is Xojo.