Re: Becoming part of Gnome Office

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 19:18, Martin Sevior wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 18:31, Brian Bruns wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > I'm working on an application that I would like to become integrated with 
> > > Gnome Office.  It's the graphical component of MDB Tools, which for those 
> > > who haven't heard of it is a reverse engineering effort for MS Access 
> > > databases (mdb files).  I've recently spent time porting it from 
> > > Gtk-only/Gnome 1.x to Gnome 2.0 and converting over to using libglade.  A 
> > > screen shot can be seen at 
> > > 
> > > http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/gmdb/gmdb2screenshot.png [132K]
> > > 
> > nice!
> > 
> > > to give you a rough idea of what it does.  But, in general, it's a tool 
> > > for dealing with Access databases under linux/*nix, which is something 
> > > currently missing from all the open office suites.
> > > 
> > > So, my questions...What does it take to become part of Gnome Office, what 
> > > types of things should be implemented wrt bonobo, gnome-print, et al?
> > > 
> > > One last thing, this is not any kind of competition with Gnome-DB, indeed 
> > > Gnome-DB access providers will use the libmdb from MDB Tools.  This 
> > > application is intended for making use of legacy data in MDB format.  
> > > Right now support is limited to read-only catalog, table data and schema 
> > > information, but I'll be adding write support, exporting of Access forms 
> > > to Glade XML format, doing something with the embeded VBA script and Gnome 
> > > Basic (TBD), and other very specific Access things that Gnome-DB will 
> > > never support being a general solution.
> > > 
> > I (and the whole gnome-db project) don't see gmdb as competition , but I
> > think you should see us as competition, since as we progress, we add
> > more and more features to cover most features in most DBMS. So, although
> > I think we would never cover 100% of access features, most of them might
> > be covered, which could (I hope not) make you lose some users.
> > 
> > Anyway, as things stand now, gmdb is the best thing by far for MS Access
> > databases on *nix, so you don't have to worry for now :-)
> > 
> 
> Could libgda be extended to to include gmdb as a data source? That way all 
> the other gnome-office applications would have access to *.mbd files. This 
> could significantly enhance the ability of Gnome-office to inter-operate 
> with MS Office particularly in Business settings which make extensive use 
> of MS Access. I see this as a significant advance where everyone wins.
> 
> gmdb gains more users, libgda gains more users, AbiWord and Gnumeric gain 
> more users.
> 
yes, that's the plan, there is a libgda provider that uses libmdb to
access MS access files. So far, it is able to read the tables in the
database and little more, but I'm working on it. Apart from that, the
big thing missing is the write support, which is in the TODO list for
libmdb.

That is, all libgda apps will have access to MS Access files via the
libgda provider that uses libmdb (part of mdb-tools). That's why I was
talking about gnome-db being a competitor for gmdb, since it will also
support access to MS Access files.

cheers