[triangleman]

I'm planning on developing a collaborative helpdesk application for my small team (perhaps 30 users), having only previous experience in standard HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL development.

I was thinking of going the web application route but I get the sense that a Windows executable is the way to go here, with its faster/more responsive interface. Major features needed: Embed and modify web pages in tabs (recreate a web browser), social "ticker" or feed, lots of cross-connections between different types of content (KB articles and tickets, for instance).

Should I go with a WPF application? I would have to teach myself XAML and C#. It would be limited in scope so that's good but it could still take forever.

Make a browser plugin in HTML/CSS/JS?

Make a full page Angular app?

In all these cases I'm going to have to learn something new, learning about Windows development may help me get ahead at my company more than other technologies, but if this project takes too long then it won't be worth it.

Any thoughts?

[rwallace]

Given your stated requirements, I'd use Qt. There's a learning curve, but no worse than with WPF or anything else.

But those are hefty requirements for a small in-house project! Spending a lot of extra programming time on production values is what you do when you're trying to appeal to the mass market. If nobody outside your team is ever going to use the program, that kind of effort doesn't pay off. Who decided the feature list and designed the user interface? Do they realize the cost and schedule implications?

[triangleman]

Maybe I oversold the feature list... I'm really just trying to do an incremental thing, a "single-page app" that helps tech support agents keep track of their tickets and what's going on with the rest of the team. Because the ticketing system is web based I figure I need to embed the web pages into the app. Then I need to make DOM calls to the page to get some info out of them, or perhaps make various GETs and POSTs to get the info I need, displayed alongside the webpage.

Not a crazy feature list, and like I said I am learning how to do this from scratch so it's kind of a 20% time hobby that I hope turns into something usable in a reasonable amount of time (3-6 months).