Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

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Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on.

I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below. It's by no means complete or exhaustive, but I think I covered quite a lot of popular as well as exotic programming languages.

There is a number of connectors which are actually developed by the Sun Database Group (aka MySQL) itself and that are ready to use:

• Connector/ODBC - Standardized database driver Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix platforms.
• …

I’m not a big fan of the polls, but I do think this one’s fairly significant: What is your primary programming language for developing MySQL applications?

Why? Because this means we know what connectors to give more love to. What kind of articles to write for the DevZone. While we might think Ruby is the next big thing since sliced bread, you folk might tell us that Delphi is probably larger than Ruby and we should be applying appropriate love there (I’m sure this statement is untrue, but for arguments sake, mmmkay?).

To vote, you actually have to click the Community link, to get to the DevZone, scroll down a bit, and get to the MySQL Quickpoll. Why can’t I link directly to the quickpoll? Why can’t you vote on the results page? That is left as an exercise to …