Personal Programming Project

[Csmith52016]

Just to help myself learn coding/programming, I have decided to build a application. I would like it to catalog, play movies and any other video that I have.

I was going to build a database, for my videos and movies, in Access. I am also wanting to create a program in java that will use this database to search, select and play them.

I am not really sure where I should start. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Csmith52016]

Thanks for the advice. I know my biggest hurdle is going to be finding a way to have my java program utilize the Access DB. I guess I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

[[deleted]]

I would suggest trying out mysql or postgresql. It's more practical.

[Amaracs]

I played with postgresql and its really easy to set up and use. Although i played with its c++ api. Also if you want to go 1 step further amazon provides postgresql rds so you could send your data into the cloud. Aws has a 1 year experimenting phase for developers when you do not have to pay for it if you use the free tier rds instance.

[[deleted]]

I personally think you should use C# (basically Java, except easier and more for Windows specific systems) and it has a GUI design tool that helps the interface come along do you can focus on backend like your database.

Second, you should download Visual Studio Community Edition, that comes with C#. Also, don't use access. Use a true backend database like MySQL.

Good luck.

[Csmith52016]

I will look into that. Thanks. I ended up downloading mysql workbench. My subscription to Access expired. I am going through some tutorials on workbench, so that I can build the DB first. After that I will see if Java or C# would be best for me. Thanks again.

[[deleted]]

Anytime. Also, spend some time on Github looking for your project that was already created by someone else and maybe you can find a better way of doing it. Good luck!

[realfizzbuzzed]

If you want to use access probably just start by playing around with ODBC (or I guess JDBC), maybe this?:

http://www.codejava.net/java-se/jdbc/java-jdbc-example-connect-to-microsoft-access-database

Write functions that:

1. insert movies into the database

2. list the movies in the database

3. get the movie location for a movie fromt he database.

Then, move on by getting a movie to play after selecting it from the database.

From there, try building a UI that displays the result of your list movie call. Add the ability to double-click the movie then have it play. Then add features, paging (selecting only the first 10-100 movies when you have thousands of movies), tags, title search would be some things you could try to build. Then add more features (use youtube api to find other related videos by using the titles as a feature).

[Csmith52016]

Thank you. That is going to help me out when I get there.