New Releases of Forms, Designer, and Common (0.1.1)

25th January 2002

The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce the release of GNUe-Forms 0.1.1, GNUe-Designer 0.1.1, and GNUe-Common 0.1.1. The 0.1.1 series of releases are primarily maintenance releases.

GNUe-Forms is a platform and UI-independent forms system. It reads an XML-based forms definition and creates GUIs for Win32, GTK, and, soon, Curses and HTML. It has a fully data-aware widget set and can be used in both 2-tier and n-tier environments.

GNUe-Designer is the IDE for the GNUe tools. It allows you to visually layout your forms in a RAD-style environment. Designer has a builtin forms client, so you can quickly test your forms while still in Designer. Designer also now has support for form creation wizards... answer a few questions, attach your form to a table, select the fields to include, and, voila, a basic form is created.

GNUe-Common is the basis for the GNUe tools, such as Forms, Reports, and Designer. It implements a database-abstraction layer that provides support for most major databases. A builtin XML-to-Object parser and Object-to-XML marshaller are used by Forms, Reports, and Designer to save and read Forms/Report definitions to and from an XML file. Work has begun on an RPC-abstraction layer that will allow server processes to define their public methods once and have them available to CORBA, XML-RPC, SOAP, and DCOM clients.

All of these releases are targeted at developers. The three products are available in source form from our website at http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/

We also have Windows installers that include all the basic dependencies -- you only have to download a single setup.exe! The Installers include support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC.

GNUe-Forms 0.1.1, Designer 0.1.1, and Common 0.1.1 have been tested and are known to run on:

• GNU/Linux (RedHat 6.x/7.x, Debian 2.x, Slackware 8.0, ...)
• Windows 95/98/2000/XP/NT
• Solaris 8.0
• FreeBSD 4.x

Changes to GNUe-Designer 0.1.1:

• Added a Data Source Editor with table introspection support and drag-and-drop field creation.
• Added a code editor based on Scintilla complete with Syntax- Highlighting (which is disabled by default)
• Cleanup of Tool frames (Object Navigator is now in a separate frame)
• Addition of "Open Recent..." support (Most-Recently-Used support)
• Start of a Developer's Guide to introduce GNUe Forms concepts
• Many bug fixes and performance enhancements

Changes to GNUe-Forms 0.1.1:

• Logs of bug fixes

Changes to GNUe-Common 0.1.1:

• Database driver performance enhancements
• Misc bug fixes and enhancements

In other news, GNUe-Reports is coming along nicely in CVS. Expect to see a release "Real Soon." A new tool, GNUe Navigator, has been added to the CVS tree. This provides a top-level menuing interface for GNUe client tools. Expect to see a release of GNUe Navigator by the next series of releases.

Return to GNUe News Archive