[Sussex] A Year without windows

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Ronan Chilvers <ronan at thelittledot.com> writes:

> A little surprising that while I was reading the article there was a
> massive flash advert for Windows 2003 and TCO in the middle of the page!
>  I suppose Newsforge uses an external advert service, but even so, Bill
> G would have giggled!

Actually it's stated MS policy to advertise in Linux centric media.

> In all seriousness, the lack of an acceptable Access replacement is a
> stumbling block for small businesses, I think. Access is great for
> whipping up small, easy databases very quickly.  

I repeat that if you actually look you will find that OOo 1.x is
capable of delivering 90% of the functionality of Access.  It has a
database font end including:

 - A GUI table editor
 - A GUI query designer
 - A form designer
 - A Basic language with a code editing environment
 - A report designer

... the only difference is that in OOo 1.x this isn't considered to be
a separate application but an integral part of all the applications
and that it relies on an external back end database (like MySQL).

I would point out that the report designer is pretty poor in OOo 1.x
though :-)

If you want to mess around with the OOo 1.x database environment
simply open up an OOo session and then hit F4 - a list of data sources
will appear will a table/query result view on the right.  Create a new
connection to a database by right clicking on the left hand side and
then go from there.

OOo2 has just taken the step of unifying an improved version of this
functionality in a recognisable database application and by working
towards making an .mdb compatible backend (so you won't need MySQL or
PostgreSQL or the like).

>Yes, I know that
> there's a big choice of database servers with every desktop distro, but
> Mr. Smith in manufacturing doesn't want to have to install MySQL - he
> wants a quick db that he can stick on CD to back it up, with which he
> can track his schedule.  Now it may not be great practice to have lots
> of people of varying skills writing databases that getted dotted around
> a company, but it's what happens and at the moment, as far as I know,
> you can't do it on Linux which is a shame.

Well, you definitely can, if he wanted to he could use the text or DBM
backends that don't require a database server - or Mr. Smith could ask
Mr Specc the IT man for an account on the centralised MySQL server.
Petty I know, but I'm like that :-)

> A _possible_ avenue to explore might be something like Gambas
> (http://gambas.sf.net).  For those who don't know its a VB like BASIC
> language with IDE for Linux.  If you're an Ubuntoid, then apt-get istall
> gambas.  Excellent project which has ENORMOUS potential to bring RAD to
> Linux in a familiar and stable way.  It also natively supports MySQL,
> Postgresql and SQLlite.  Could potentially be a solution to the quick DB
> problem?

Yup.  Though I'd still take the OOo 1.x route first.  It's an even
bigger project with serious support behind it, plus I've used it to
develop a reporting infrastructure here :-)

You might also what to check out Blackadder - a Python/Ruby based IDE
for small database development.

Better still - I'd tell Mr. Smith that we no longer use office
software - but that's just my little dream :-)

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org