New Releases of Forms, Designer, and Common (0.1.0)
21st November 2001
The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce the release of GNUe-Forms 0.1.0, GNUe-Designer 0.1.0, and GNUe-Common 0.1.0.
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.gnue.org/
For the first time, 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 0.1.0, Designer 0.1.0, and Common 0.1.0 have been tested and are known to run on:
o GNU/Linux (RedHat 6.x/7.x, Debian 2.x, Slackware 8.0, ...)
o Windows 95/98/2000/XP/NT
o Solaris 8.0
o FreeBSD 4.x
Changes to GNUe-Forms 0.1.0:
o Removed Python 1.5.2 support. (Python 2.x is now required.)
o Numerous performance improvements
o Migration to new GNUe common data driver model:
o Most major databases are now databases supported (See below)
o Master/detail support has been fine-tuned
o Suport for a new trigger/event: "On-Print"
o Support for Win32 platforms (binary installer)
o Numerous bug fixes
Changes to GNUe-Designer 0.1.0:
o Added support for new features in GNUe-Forms 0.1.0.
o Includes Wizard support/Automatic form generation. Wizards are simple Python scripts that conform to a basic design. A sample wizard is included.
o The tree-view now shows icons.
o Reorder-by-location added (Changes the tab-order based on screen position)
o Added support for "deprecated" attributes. If your form already uses a deprecated attribute, Designer will still let you use it. However, Designer will not let you create a new form with the deprecated attribute.
o First attempt at mouse support for positioning widgets
o Support for Win32 platform (binary installer)
o Startup warnings dialogs
o Many bug fixes and performance enhancements
o Persistant session information -- Designer remembers the state (window sizes, position, etc) from the last session and restores them when Designer is re-opened.
Changes to GNUe-Common 0.1.0:
o New Database/Backend Support (Not all tested)
o DB2, Informix, Ingres, Interbase, ODBC, Oracle,
o PostgreSQL (pygresql, popy, pypgsql, psycopg)
o MySQL, SAP-DB, Sybase, SQL-Relay
o Changes required by newer forms, reports, and designer
o Start of RPC abstraction support
o Start of support for Formatting Masks
o Misc bug fixes and enhancements
In other news, GNUe-Reports is coming along nicely in CVS. Expect to see a release "Real Soon." Also, an HTML UI driver for Forms is well underway in CVS (thanks madlocke!). This driver runs on top of Webware (http://webware.sf.net.) Also, trigger/event support is being reworked and hopefully plans for it will be finalized soon.
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