[gnome-db] Re: gnome-db development, RE Visual Reports for MYSQL/POSTGRES

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Sat, 2001-12-22 at 16:18, Jimspbox aol com wrote:
> Many apologies for not responding sooner, I've been out of the country on 
> business.
> 
> Thanks for your reply, I would be very happy to help on the gnome-db stuff.  
> Is the frontend under active development, or still in planning?
> 
still planning, because nobody has started writing it, but if you do, it
will get to the development phase :-)
The fact is that we've based the (little) work we've made on the report
part in the engine part, the low level stuff, so nothing has been done
about the UI.

That's why, if you want the job, it's yours :-)

> I would like to know more about the framework etc. if you have a spare 5 
> minutes to mail.
>
yes, a quick explanation:

* there is a report engine, CORBA-based, which will be implementing the
report execution part. It will get, as input, a XML file which describes
the report structure and layout, will fill it with data from a database,
and will return the resulting XML.
This is for the 1st phase. We want later on to add it, via plugins, the
capacity to convert that XML into another formats (PDF, PS, HTML, etc).
Also, cached reports would be really useful in this report server

* then, there's a library, called libgda-report, which allows access,
for clients, to the report engine

* then, there's the report UI, which can include several things, such as
a report viewer, a report designer, and...
 
> The ideas for the development are excellent; I think it would create a really 
> impressive (not to mention very useful) package.  Next on my to-learn list is 
> bonobo, is it possible that we can extend the functionality to include 
> embeddable reports?
> 
absolutely! That's the idea, that you could just insert a report into
your abiword or gnumeric documents. This will be a killer feature for
our report engine.

As a first phase for this part, I think we should just have the
different report UIs (designer, viewer, etc) implemented as widgets, and
then, as it's very easy to do, just add the Bonobo control/embeddable
part around those widgets.

> Could you point me in the right direction to get information on the project 
> and perhaps getting started?
>
yes, the best thing to do would be to get the sources from CVS, as this
is the best (and only?) source of info for that. The code right now is a
bit messy since it needs a bit of GNOME 2 work, but I'll be organizing
it these next days so that you find it easy to look at the sources. I'll
keep you informed.

> That way we all get free beer :->
> 
yes :-)

cheers

PS: if you subscribe to our mailing list, we can continue the talk
there, so that everybody can listen. Also you may want to drop by our
IRC channel (#gnome-db at irc.gnome.org), so that we can talk

-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> - <rodrigo ximian com>
http://www.gnome-db.org/ - http://www.ximian.com/