answer:You haven’t said whether your app is web-based or not, but that might affect my suggestion. I’d say go with PHP if it is or PERL if it’s not. MySQL is a good database choice, but there are many. I’m suggesting these options because they’re: • free (monetarily) • widely available from hosting providers • have favorable licensing terms for startups and established businesses alike • all pretty well-balanced between ease of use and finding professional programmers if you ever need outside help FWIW, you really have a lot of options here and you’re talking about doing probably a number of applications. You’re talking about some kind of client-server arrangement, which means you might even write in one language on the server and another on the client. Since the data will be stored in a database, you really have the option to use any language with faculties for working with said database. The hard part early on might be changing the database, not the programming language you use to manipulate the data and output. Almost any language should be able to work with MySQL, which is one reason I suggest it. Local input could be as simple as making Excel spreadsheets with your data, saving it locally, and uploading it to a server that processes the input when you get around to it.