--- Yegor Gilyov <egor@irk.ru> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> KDE looks great, and KOffice (even Alpha) looks cool too.
> But KOffice applications list don't include one important [IMHO]
> component: IDE
> for writing extensions and small applications based on KOffice
> technologies.
> KOffice supports scripting. It's good. But programmers (not guru,
> entry-level
> programmers wrote a lot of MS Office extensions) needs in IDE to write
> KOffice
> scripts. 
> Where are VBA in MS Office, and Applixware has IDE too (I don't remember
> name...)
> Can you impress this IDE, based on Python and KOM/OP technology, with
> intergated dialog builder... You can write standalone python
> applications
> too... It will be first free RAD for Linux!

This sort of functionality will be built into katabase. One component of
it (which can be run by itself, I think) will be a form viewer and editor
like the one in Access. Another important part will be kscript, which I
imagine can be extended to include a decent editing environment. That's
going to be a great thing about katabase: if you don't need the plugin to
load (and everything in it will be a plugin, including the database
engines) then you don't load it, just like if you don't put a picture in
Kword, it won't load up kimage. That way, you can build real applications
within katabase as well as database applications. 

My reason for this is that the only difference between an application and
a database application is that a database application needs database
support. Right now, Michael Koch is workin on the form editor/viewer, and
I'm working on the database engine. We're making it so that people who
don't need forms and such (like for a small mailing list) don't have to
have it loaded, and people who want to make an application real quick but
don't need database stuff can do so without loading the database engines.

Jim

PS: Good news! After a long search, we have decided that the initial
desktop engine (not a separate SQL server) will use the PostgreSQL 6.5
internals. They use tab-delimited files for tables, and the internals are
about 5 MB. This means that we can piggyback on recent releases of
Postgres, therefore having the latest features with minimal work. The
latest version contains great features such as row-level locking and
others. Look at http://www.postgresql.org/index.html for more stuff. The
tab-delimited file format means import/export filters will be trivial, and
can upsize easily to Postgres, Oracle, and any other text-based SQL server
with minimal trouble.
===
Jim McCusker | mccusker@iname.com
http://cif.rochester.edu/~fprefect
Wax I in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, 
and your odors of father of elderberries! Go now far, or I 
taunt you second once, you them English pig-dogs!
--Monty Python through babelfish.altavista.com

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