David Bain said I am toying with the idea of offering GNUe to my clients. I would need at least 2 experienced consultants who I could contact for help. Mostly email or phone support. If you are interested in exploring the possiblities please contact me. This would, of course, be a paying job.

The next day, on IRC, James Thompson (jamest) said i think it's doable. I'm thinking that most of us here are willing to answer questions w/o money waved in front of us - but - i think some people in here might jump at the chance to make $$ on the side. In terms of product quality, he noted I've commited to a Feb 15th rollout of a new system using only GNUe Forms - this is a pull the plug kind of setup on the old system - and I sleep ok at night. GNUe Application Server was not production-ready, however - it's got lots of changes planned - and the primary coder's are busy with "real life" - so it's on back burner for a bit.

Further to , Jason Cater announced that Nightly snapshots of the GNUe code base are now available via our website at: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/snapshots/. These are primarily useful for developers who wish to test the current CVS base but cannot use the cvs tools (e.g., people behind a firewall). These snapshots are made at approximately midnight (Central timezone) each night. Snapshots are kept for 5 nights before being deleted. Snapshots are available in both Unix *.tar.gz and Win32 *.zip formats. He warned NOTE: These are CVS snapshots and, as such, may or may not run as expected. If you are looking for the latest released versions of the tools, visit http://www.gnuenterprise.org/ and click on the Downloads link.

Jerry Tang asked how to create the database for the GNUe Application Server in PostgreSQL. Reinhard Müller said All you (should) need to do is create an empty database "gnue" and adjust the username in src/geas.conf (it defaults to "hacker")..

Malek Hadj-Ali reported an error message he got trying to launch a geas server on a linux box. Reinhard Müller suggested You might have to check if MySQL is running, if you have a database named test_mysql, and if the username in geas.conf is correct..

Ivan Gudym (ivan) noted that GNUe Application Server used CORBA, saying he was afraid corba can be very slow :( . Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said we are not LOCKED into CORBA - the docs are slightly dated as you noted - CORBA was ONLY transport that was stable at time of those docs on Linux - now SOAP and XML-RPC are showing signs of promis. We are working on an abstraction layer for RPC - so much like GEAS could support virtually any relational database it has a driver for, so it could support any remote method transport it had a driver for - like CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, TCP/IP Sockets, Jabber, MSMQ, etc etc etc.

Derek Neighbors noted that many of the problems people were having installing GNUe were related to getting python2.x installed and then getting all the python 'tools' installed recognizing 2.x instead of 1.5.2. He had put some information on the website about this. He said after you get python 2.1 installed those shoudl be valid packages for wx and pyxml dependencies - and then you should be good to go to install gnue :).

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said remind me to email baux about debian packages so we can get the source in cvs tree so we can fumble with trying to resolve the bugs. He said im thinking we really need to make it complex :( and have seperate packages for each database driver supported by GNUe Common - it updates your connection file and grabs the driver. Peter Sullivan (psu) asked Can Debian packages have a 'one of many' dependancy? i.e. Forms depends on one or more of Common-mysql, common-odbc, etc. Derek said techinically forms doesnt - as you can make forms that dont connect to databases. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) suggested then you'd have a Recommends: or Suggests: tag. Derek said im not huge fan of lots of packages but its necessary to make things more simple and we will get gnue part of 'tasksel' or whatever it is now. Jan Ischebeck (jan__) asked can't you just make an good debconf script.... asking for your databases, and building connections.conf? Derek replied i think good debconf will be necessary to update the conf file.

Peter Sullivan (psu) said When we get some apps, this is where the depends/recommends will be v useful - i.e. pretty much everything will recommend GL, PO will recommend AP, etc Derek said we dont know if we will use apt directly to do 'applications' or whether gnue will have to roll own apt type tool to do them. If this was the case, we would not write something like it from scratch but rather would extend it - but thats a full other discussion. Jason Cater (jcater) pointed out that apt is linux (debian?) specific anyway, so it won't solve our Application packaging needs across all the different platforms GNUe would support.

Jason Cater said that 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. . These were primarily maintenance releases.. He explained what each package was for, and said All of these releases are targeted at developers.. There were also versions for Microsoft Windows that include all the basic dependencies -- you only have to download a single setup.exe! . This included drivers for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC.

The packages had been tested on various distributions of GNU/Linux, various versions of Microsoft Windows, Solaris 8.0 and FreeBSD 4.x.

Most of the changes since 0.1.0 were in Designer -

There had also been many bug-fixes and performance enhancements in Forms and Common. Reports is coming along nicely in CVS. Expect to see a release "Real Soon." The next set of releases should also include Navigator, which was already available in CVS.

Maurizio Boriani (baux) said I'd like to implement a python methos which retrive all fields in a table and return them. Then write a client which use this method and print out results. He clarified he meant retrieve all data for all fields and all rows. Reinhard Müller (reinhard) said that if you know the field names then you can look at examples/python/addrbook.py. This wasn't a server side method, but i don't see how you would do this with a serverside method - actually you don't need a method at all here [...] you only need a client that requests and reads and outputs the data. Maurizio said this had just been an example - my final idea is to have all insert and cheks methos serverside and call them from remote client. Reinhard said he understood the idea of server side check methods, but didn't see how server side insert methods would work because for insert you need to provide the data. However, he noted that serverside methods are IMPORTANT - and even more - they are UNFINISHED :-(. Maurizio said that he thought delegate insert to client was a good idea.

J Robiez (roby) reported a problem with testing the windows version of gfclient against a simple sqlserver database, the query generated is "select something form atable where ((1=0))" so i dont have any result. James Thompson (jamest) said that if this was happening at start up, it was because when we need an empty record we run a query like the one above and it returns a blank resultSet. I don't recall why we did it this way so if it's giving you problems we can readdress the issue. However that query looks like normal operatoin. The form on startup typically doesn't pull the data from the table until you request a query. Instead it creates a single empty new record (via that query). To get it to pull your data you have to entry query mode then execute the query J Robiez said it works perfect thx.

James went on to explain modes in forms are normal and query. Query mode works like this (i'll describe keyboard usage not menu ) - press f8 to entery query mode - then fill in fields using sql92 wildcards - so if i have a name field and I wanted to search for all names begining w/ J I'd put in J%. Fill as many or as few fields as you like then press f9 to execute the query. After that, f8 once : entry query mode, f8 again while in query mode : recall last query settings, f8 yet again while in query mode : cancel query, return to normal.

Derek Neighbors explained fwiw: geas is not production ready so unless you are looking to 'develop' on geas you might want to look into running 2 tier for now. Ivan Gudym (ivan) said he understood, but was interested in GEAS anyway - i don't want to try just gui building - it's easy ;) - but aproach to oo binding to sql - thats cool thing . He asked if GEAS had been effectively dropped. Derek said they had focused on the 2-tier tools to meet customer demand - an OO SQL adapter is a good thing and we arent STOPPING GEAS development. I have yet to hear anyone here say there is no use for GEAS or that its not wanted - simply that we dont have the resources 'today' to put full focus on it. Later, Reinhard Müller (reinhard) added geas is not dead at all - it just has been on a very long holiday - but we already await it's return ;).

Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked where the design method sits between "thrash it out and see" and a more formal method?. Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said we hacve found that when you are not in same office its a happy medium - discuss things formally for a bit then thrash out what was discussed - see what worked what didnt and recycle. For OFFICIAL packages it will be much more 'formal' - for tools and unofficial packages less formal i.e. we believe in DESIGN but we also believe there is concept of OVER design - look at sourceforge for example of thousands of projects that have no code and nothing working cause they are still 'designing'. Calum said there were also plenty a product with no obvious design behind it. He asked whether there was a helpdesk module being designed/planned for the future? Derek said that DCL was being converted to gnue archicture - and enhanced in many areas.

Jason Cater (jcater) noted two extra features that he had added to GNUe Designer - cross-hair selection of widgets (i.e., you click in an area then drag across the editor to select multiple widgets) and You can click an entry icon in the toolbar, then click in the panel and draw a box the size you want the widget, and it automatically creates the widget as that size - plus I fixed the Shift + Click bug.

James Thompson (jamest_) said he would like to get GNUe Forms working with GNUe Application Server but until the segfault issue can be resolved i don't know what to do . Reinhard Müller (reinhard) asked segfault issue is in orbit-python, right?. Jason Cater (jcater) said it's a known issue w/the current orbit-python - they forgot to test boolean support. He said they've fixed in CVS, iirc - but it's been november since a release.

Kalle Andersson (KalleAnka) asked How would GNUe compare to Axapta? James Thompson (jamest_) immediately suggested we're easier to spell :). Reinhard Müller (reinhard) said the main differences were:

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said that GNUe could run on almost any system :) - when curses comes back online, the number of systems will grow even more :). Reinhard emphasised GNUe is very modular which means you install only what you need and don't even bother about the rest.

Kalle asked Would GEAS compare to the Axapta Object server??. Kalle explained AOS is used when you want the thin-clients ... otherwise your client will speak directly to the DB. Reinhard said yes - we call that 2-tier and n-tier - n-tier is thin client.

Later, Kalle asked Python seems to be common in GNUe, any specific reason why? Jason Cater (jcater) said cause it rocks our socks. More prosaically, Derek noted python is HIGHLY productive and portable.

Peter Sullivan (psu) asked about a GNUe presence at the Linux World Expo later this week. Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said um actually we have a booth - but no one will be at it - we had last minute change in situation :( so ANYONE that can articulate GNUe and wants to sit at our booth and hand things out PLEASE let me know. Alternatively, actually ibm is donating boxes - if someone can just make it first day of show - configure a debian box [...] we can give demos via vnc from remote locations.

Following on from , Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said using db2 here w/ forms is becoming more a necessity. However, getting free DB2 database drivers for a Windows client looked impossible - so i think im regelated to use ODBC. However, the current ODBC code in GNUe Common couldn't do introspection to find out what tables and fields were in a database, which was needed to be able to use the wizards in Designer. Jason Cater (jcater) said he had been thinking about this - as our introspection support is really nothing more than a set of selects , you could use the introspection code from the non-ODBC version of the database driver and allow odbc to use the db-specific select statements to do introspection.

He hacked together an odbc-db2 driver as a quick fix for Derek in CVS, but warned that's not official yet... not sure I want ppl using it ;) and disclaimed I don't have a DB2 database, much less DB2 over ODBC, and certainly no experience w/DB2 system catalogs, so that may need a little "tweaking" :). The introspection methods were based on documentation he had found on the web.

Derek had some problems installing Forms (including the odbc-db2 driver) from a CVS snapshot Jason did for him. However, with help from Jason and James Thompson (jamest), he got all the dependancies installed. He was getting some errors, but James noted that Jason had not had any way to test it out before checking it in. Designer couldn't see the SYSCAT.TABLES table it needed for introspection, but this might be because the user name and password Derek was using didn't have the necessary privaleges, or because Derek was using such an old version of DB2 - but old versions of DB2 were notoriously long-lived. James was going to check in the fixes so far, and they would try again tomorrow.

The next day, Derek and Jason worked together to try to progress the issue. Jason asked can you select * from sysibm.systables? I've found 2 catalog schemas in use by DB2 - I picked the one in use by Universal Server but I guess you use the other :) . Derek confirmed sysibm.systables works!. Jason noted that this was documented on the web. This appeared to relate to older versions of DB2 such as Derek's. Derek said that, for bigger databases we might hav eto have 'subclassed' providers for version - so you might have provider db2_5_5, provider db2_6_0, provider db2_7_0 or whatever if there were diffs. He suggested oracle might be same way - though their big change was about 4 years ago, so you would have to probably go back to pre 7 to have 'issues'.

Jason asked how are table names "unique" in DB2? Derek said there is a space and a table, but he wasn't sure if the same table name could be used in different table spaces. Jason said this was important. Derek tried to find out the struct of SYSIBM.TABLES to tell you the primary key but couldn't. He said let me go ask a mainframe guy.

They did some more debugging, and Derek exclaimed i get a table list and not long after confirmed bingo - it completed the wizard in Designer using the odbc-db2 provider. Forms appeared to be still using the normal odbc provider, however. Jason reminded Derek that odbc-db2 is actually using odbc code (except the schema* methods), but asked Derek to send him log files and can you send me the gfd file too? and the updated DBdriver so he could sleuth some more.

James Thompson (jamest) said i wish i could post some of my forms screenshots , but they had been done for a proprietary client. He explained it's a real world application and work on do for them that is generic goes back to us. The deal was that the gfd's are theirs - any mods to forms is ours. He added their willingness to do this has been a huge boost to forms - a few weeks ago a ton of bugs got stomped out of forms and designer just trying to bring their stuff up to date with the 0.1.1 release.

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said getting someone to agree that 'generic' stuff can go back to public is HUGE boost. He admitted to being defenesive as we dont want to be viewed as ximian :). He said in fact where i did this i acutally GPL'd the works i.e. i give the code to the customer as GPL - this is so they CANT profit on it either i.e. the customer cant take the system and 'resell' it and they arent violating GPL as long as they never distribute it. He explained basically i give copyright to myself and license under the GPL and give them a copy - then i sign a non compete for x number of years for their SPECIFIC industry competition. This is best of all worlds to me - it tells them im not out to kill your business but my work remains my work and after you ahve had adequate time to 'lead' industry i can distribute even to your industry. Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said he was curious as if I got some oppurtunity to hack a paying GNUe solution I would like to know how you guys handle things.

Derek said he tried to keep the copyright of his work, but i generally cut the rate to compensate . James suggested derek does the work for free if he can come over once a month and flog the tech support staff ;P. Derek said at this point i am wililng to do solutions for free for companies that will do all free solution using gnue and will a. give the work back under gpl copyright to FSF; b. willing to do press release they are using gnue; c. willing to participate in case study if asked. He cited examples of some linux case studies for schools.

Yevgeny Sizikov (StormBringer) asked about choosing between E/AS or GNUe. Derek Neighbors (derek) said i cant tell you what to choose - heck i dont even know your needs - but a few things i can comment on from the side. He raised the issues of working code, ownership of the copyright, experience of project team, size of project team, number of customers and type of license. (See also previous discussions in .)

Yevgeny asked about tables or grids in user forms. Derek said if i do <entry rows="4"> it will make that entry repeat 4 times thus forming a 'grid' 1 x 4 - <entry rows="4"><entry rows="4"> would give me a 2 x 4 grid and so on.. He explained this approach is because we plan to support such a WIDE range of ui's from curses to wap to palm to you name it - something like this we feel we can implement anywhere . He clarified that this was just the display area - you can put a widget on the right for 'scrollbar'. He added we do plan to support 'real' (like gtk/win) grids at somepoint but we arent going there yet. As to tables, we are starting process of 'layout managers' which i assume is equivalent of what you mean by tables? i.e. so you dont have to have absolute positioning.

It was asked if there any tutorials written to show how to use gnue to write an application. Reinhard Müller (reinhard) said that http://www.gnuenterprise.org/~neilt/sc.html contains a link to a "module writer's guide". Later, Derek Neighbors (derek) suggested techrefguide.pdf in the doc directory of forms - the module writer guide probably isnt much help except for people wishing to write modules for gnue as its a lot of standards and things iirc.

Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked are there any known problems with forms client 0.1.1, python 2.2 and pypgsql 2.0 on NT5 ?. Jason Cater (jcater) said you're the first to test that combo, iirc - actually, 0.1.1 is fresh out the door. Calum said after I've entered the username and password ... nothing happens - it's fine for ONE of my pgsql databases on ONE of my machines... After some work, he confirmed that the problem was the authentication method objected to me trying to log into the database with a different user id than my windows login.

Later, he confirmed that GNUe Forms seems to be using ident based logins regardless of me specifying trust or password. This was different to both the native pgsql apps on my box and GNUe Designer. James Thompson (jamest) confirmed that's a new bug, and said i wil try and fix cvs today, as the bug was in the pypgsql driver we built into the win32 binaries. Calum wondered about installing GNUe Forms from CVS after the bug had been fixed. James said Calum would need all the dependencies listed for a unix install - then if you want to build .exes you need mcmillian installers, and inno setup tool - it may be easier for us to bundle you new ones. Calum suddenly remembers why he used the win .exe version. James fixed the bug in CVS and said he would try and make new gfclient and gfdes pre-releases this afternoon.

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) asked James Thompson (jamest) and Jason Cater (jcater) to discuss trigger stuff they had been talking about. Jason emphasised that we are not discussing high-level concepts. James suggested that a new tree of GTriggerObject objects could be created which would then be callable from inside triggers, or even outside of the trigger system. In order to avoid having to create lots of object representing the same thing, he would prefer to have a single GNameSpace instance that all the namespaces could use. Jason said when executing a code fragment in python, you can specific a global namespace and a local namespace - iirc, we currently only pass in a global namespace. I'm thinking we can use the distinction to our advantage - the global namespace always points to a universally maintained trigger sandbox (which contains no "local" references). James said he liked the sound of this - now when to init this puppy - if I put in forms code then every app would have to have trigger init code that wanted triggers. Jason thought this would be better done in the base application. However, he had been thinking for a while that we need a "common" class that all top-level GObj's subclass from and this could be used to hold the init code. James said i like this - i think. He asked would people prefer we setup a gnue-dev channel and log that and keep this stuff out of the main channel? or are people cool with us talking like this in public? :).

Jan Ischebeck (jan) asked what is wrong with the triggers at the moment?. James said they work ok - it's just really hard to get at things a person needs in a trigger.

Later, James asked does anyone care if I break .fields. in forms triggers? . Jason agreed. James asked does anyone have a better name for gobjProperties? He explained you can nest as deep as you lke - form.page.block.field etc,etc but each GObj can define a _triggerGet and _triggerSet which are used when ever a trigger tries to read or set a object . Jason asked for blocks or datasources, how would you do a next record? . James said that would be block.nextRecord(). He wanted to avoid using the word 'properties,' as estate management applications might be difficult to write if that was a reserved word! Jason suggested well, we could take the traditional python security model and do block.__properties__.foo [...] that also shows that its not something you'd use everyday.

Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked if there were any plans to alter the way connections are currently set through the connections.conf file. Jason Cater (jcater) said you could either do it via the connections.conf file, or via a <database> tag in the gfd file (for a standalone app, perhaps). Calum said he was afraid of user screwup basically. Jason said I personally would never give my users permission to edit that file. James Thompson (jamest) and Jason both suggested storing the connections.conf file on a web server. James said i network mount mine.

Later, Calum said I was thinking of a system management db ... so that any generic [ish] settings can be called rather than loaded from a file . James said that was/is part of the GNUe spec however we don't have anyone working on it. In general, most GNUe users/project team members preferred file-based methods of setting parameters, as referred to in Jason said that even with a completely db-based solution... you would still need connections.conf or equivalent to tell the client where the system management database was! He wasn't sure there was a fundamental difference. They had already discussed having forms stored in databases but as an OPTION :). Calum liked the sound of this.

Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) asked is there anywhere the grpc and db driver apis are described in more detail? I read RPC-abstraction.txt last night - it was pretty "high level" - UML diagrams would be nice - in fact I would make some if I could understand things ;). Jason Cater (jcater) said that grpc is temporarily on hold - due to pressing needs elsewhere.

Jan Ischebeck (Jan) demonstrated a basic Forms client he had written in PHP. Everyone was very impressed. James Thompson (jamest) asked are you going to attempt to reimplement forms in PHP or just the UI part?. Jan said I thought of a complete reimplementation . Jan said the motivation for re-implementing Forms in PHP was that its. faster to it in one language.

James warned that Forms was a moving target. Jan said he would need good documentation.. James said that the techref documentation was fairly up to date - we try to verify it before every release - however it needs some cleanup.