30th September 2002
The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce a new release of it's enterprise application development suite. This release includes:
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 (text), 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 has support for form creation wizards... answer a few questions, attach your form to one or more database tables, select the fields to include, and, voila, a basic form is created.
GNUe-Reports is a platform and output-independent reporting system. It reads an XML-based report definition and generates arbitrary XML output that can further be translated into any format for which there is an adapter. GNUe Reports currently has outputs for Text, HTML, and CSV -- with PDF, Postscript, and Gnumeric/Excel formats in the works. Reports can output directly to a file, as an email attachment, to a printer, or to a HylaFax server.
GNUe Application Server is the data and business rules server for the GNU Enterprise project. It will provide an object- oriented backend to forms and reports. In an n-tier environment, GEAS holds all business rules/logic and provides object-to- relational access to various database backends. This release is primarily a proof-of-concept release that illustrates the use of GNUe-Common's database backends and RPC abstraction tools.
GNUe Navigator is a menuing system for GNUe Forms and Reports. It presents a consistent menuing interface (in GUI or Text) based on an XML "process definition." GNUe Navigator uses the GNUe Forms or GNUe Reports clients to run the actual forms and reports, so these corresponding tools must be installed.
GNUe-Common is the basis for the GNUe tools, such as Forms, Reports, Application Server, 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. It also defines and implements 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 five products are available in source form from our website at
http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/current.php
We also have Windows installers for GNUe-Designer and GNUe-Forms that include all the basic dependencies -- you only have to download a single setup.exe! The Installers include support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC. These installers are available in the same locations listed above.
The tools have been tested and are known to run on:
In other news, work on GNUe Integrator has commenced in CVS. GNUe Integrator will initially allow batch-mode transfers of data from one data source to another. This can be used, for example, to transfer web sales data from a MySQL database to a SAP-DB backoffice system, or data from a CVS file to a production database. Expect a premiere release in the not-too- distant future.
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