[gnome-db] Re: post-GUADEC plans

[Vivien Malerba STNA 7FD M204 <vivien malerba aviation-civile gouv fr>]

> Hi

Hi all!

> 
> I've been this week in Dublin for GUADEC (http://www.guadec.org), and I
> come with very good news for us.
> 
> I've been talking with Martin Sevior, from Abiword, about a GNOME Office
> release in August. Because of that, we talked about the following
> things:
> 
> * libgda/libgnomedb should reach a 1.0 version at that time. And,
> looking at the current status, it seems we can punt some functionality
> originally planned for 1.0 and concentrate on stabilizing the current
> codebase, writing documentation, fixing crashes, etc.
> Thinking about this, it seems to me a good idea, since I have to agree
> that the objectives for 1.0 have been large too much (reports, graphics,
> lots of providers, etc). So, freezing now (or in a few weeks time so
> that some new features can be added for a little while) could help us in
> making more widely known our work. Also, it seems to me
> libgda/libgnomedb (5 years old) really need a 1.0 ASAP.
> The punted features would be marked as post-1.0 work, and we can even
> CVS branch and have people work on post-1.0 while we prepare 1.0. So,
> this means development would not be stopped. I will myself (and I hope
> other people too :-) concentrate on 1.0, but won't stop anyone to work
> on other things.

Surely having a 1.0 release would be good!

> 
> * unfortunately, I don't think Mergeant is ready for 1.0 yet, so all
> this would mean that we would decouple libgda/libgnomedb and mergeant to
> be separated releases. A worst consequence of this could be that
> Mergeant is not included in the GNOME Office release. Or do you think
> with a bit of bugfixing mergeant, with its current features, can be
> released as a 1.0 software?

Right, Mergeant is not yet ready for 1.0 release (it still has many
crashes, it can't do a lot of things, etc). In fact I'm planning a
complete rewrite of it using a new library I'm currently writing (which
I've, suprisingly, named libmergeant).

I plan to make a bit more work on that lib and release it soon.
Basically the new lib will have the following features:
- uses libgda for any access to the DBMS
- creates a memory structure for all the DBMS objects (data types,
functions, aggregates, tables, views, tables fields, some constraints so
far)
- creates memory structures for any type of DML query (even complex ones
with sub-queries) and can render them to SQL (and hopefully to XQL
later).
- each query can have execution parameters which must (or may) be
provided before query execution
- has a powerfull widget to display and select most of the types of
objects in libmergeant (table, fields, data types, queries, etc)
- has several widgets to make it easy to have a form and a tabular views
of data
- has a plugin system to extend the default widgets used to enter or
modify data, depending on the data type of the manipulated data.
- uses XML for all the storage issues.
- can optionnaly use libgnomedb for some better features.
- has an up-to-date (well almost) documentation using gtk-doc

I plan then to extend it to have more graphical components (like a
specialized canvas), DDL queries and reports generation.

When that lib is ready, a rewrite of mergeant using the lib will not be
very difficult as most of the features currently provided by mergeant
will be in libmergeant. Libmergeant can of course be used outside the
scope of mergeant itself.

Maybe, if you find the library usefull and if the lib is stable enough
(which I think will be the case), we can then make common releases of
libgda/libgnomedb/libmergeant/mergeant, no?

> 
> Another good news :-) The people from igalia (http://www.igalia.com)
> have used libgda for their ERP app (http://www.fisterra.org) after
> having tried with Java, and libgda was 40/50 times quicker than the Java
> technologies being used (SOAP, JDBC IIRC what they said in the talk). So
> yeah, we're ready for 1.0 :-)

Good!

Cheers,

Vivien