How powerful is VB withOUT Java, etc?!!

[cgl88]

I'm fairly new with VB programming and am learning more and more each day. Boy is it powerful. BUT...for things like adding components and ole's, this is what troubles me:
If you have a dB back end, on Access, how can you ASSUME the user you distribute it to has MS Access?!! Is this a shortcoming of Visual basic? Or is VB meant to be coupled with Access, SQL, Oracle, with the developer knowing already what the end user has? My prof said to make a VB e-commerce site and to have it work with Access even though access isn't on the user's system...that you need ....JAVA....

Please advise/comment!

Access is just a front end editor for the acctualy database, You can use/create/distribute MDB's anywhere without having access(you can even create the database without having access).

Hope this helps.

[Paul282]

This seems very odd coming form a JAVA programmer who has to piss around with JDBC etc and wouldn't know a printer dirver to save his life in windows were it not for Ms J++.

VB has the jet engine built into the componants for DAO. meaning you can access it without MS access. obviously you need an SQL or Oracle server somewhere to accress those types of DB because they are not flat file, but ODBC can take care of most things that there aren't drivers for alresdy in VB.

VB's component model is built on ActiveX like Borland C++ is built on VCL and to a lesser degree like VC++ is built on MFC (you can use VC++ without MFC it's just not advisable). ActiveX components (next Gen OLE) have all the dll's and OCX files in the component required to do the job. the install program must make sure these are packed and registered in the system with the exe (automatic if you use VB's package tools)

The lack of Static linking may annoy you but at least its native compiled and doesn't require a JIT compiler