GNUe Traffic #44 For 31�Aug�2002

By Peter Sullivan

"/me , remember, never minimize a irc window !" - "IRC can NEVER be minimised, closed or hidden" - "you can't shut off real life like that" - "/me has no doubt real life == IRC - /me knows that anything else is merely a shadow of existence"

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	21�Aug�2002�-�26�Aug�2002	(2 posts)	Documentation on using GNUe Designer
  2.	22�Aug�2002		Possible GNUe consultancy
  3.	22�Aug�2002�-�27�Aug�2002		New GNU Enterprise website
  4.	22�Aug�2002		Working on GNU Enterprise
  5.	25�Aug�2002		ebXML and e-business in Australia
  6.	25�Aug�2002		Using GNUe Application Server with phpGW
  7.	26�Aug�2002		GNUe on linuxfund
  8.	26�Aug�2002�-�27�Aug�2002		wxGTK2 driver for Forms
  9.	27�Aug�2002		wxPython debugging whilst developing GNUe Designer
  10.	27�Aug�2002		Transparent blocks in Forms

Introduction

This Cousin covers the three main mailing lists for the GNU Enterprise project, gnue, gnue-dev and gnue-announce. It also covers the #gnuenterprise IRC channel. A great deal of development discussion for this project goes on in IRC. You can find #gnuenterprise on irc.openprojects.net:6667, or you can review the logs. For more information about the GNU Enterprise project, see their home page at http://www.gnuenterprise.org.

1. Documentation on using GNUe Designer

21�Aug�2002�-�26�Aug�2002 (2 posts) Archive Link: "Designer docs ??"

Topics: Designer

People: Robert Jenkins,�Derek Neighbors

Robert Jenkins asked "Are there any docs that cover the actual useage of Gnue Designer? I.e. what the less obvious items in 'property inspector' do, and how to edit them?" Derek Neighbors thought "there is a techref of sorts for both forms and designer in cvs. Your best bet is to stop by irc (irc.openprojects.net #gnuenterprise) and get help in real time. I have on my list to make a nice tutorial for beginners of GNUe."

2. Possible GNUe consultancy

22�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 23 Aug 2002"

People: Derek Neighbors,�Andrew Mitchell

Derek Neighbors changed his nick to (sleepy), as "i get to fly accross the states today so it will be a LONG day - then a friend of GNUe is picking me up in atlanta and driving me to south carolina - believe it or not i think we landed the first 'big' GNUe consulting gig" . Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) asked "that means a bit more development done on tools & packages? and a bit more name recognition" ? Derek said "um i have a feeling the tools are going to get" a lot more use and development "in the next two months :)"

3. New GNU Enterprise website

22�Aug�2002�-�27�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 23 Aug 2002"

Topics: Application Server

People: Adam Hull,�Peter Sullivan,�Christian Selig,�Bajusz Tam�s,�Daniel Baumann,�Perry Lorier,�Reinhard M�ller,�Jason Cater,�Jan Ischebeck,�Jan Ischebeck

Adam Hull (fixe) asked what content management system (CMS) was currently used on the www.gnuenterprise.org website, before noting "ahhh duh, says at the bottom of the page, php-nuke" . Peter Sullivan (psu), mindful of Issue�#43, Section�#8� (15�Aug�2002:�New GNU Enterprise website) , foreshadowed "but not, he said dramatically, for much longer ;-)" Adam asked about postnuke. Christian Selig (lupo) noted that "at our company, we use postnuke for the internal community site, but the upgrade process is a real pain in the ass." Adam said "what attracts me to postnuke is the mod community" . Peter said that the new www.gnuenterprise.org site would be "going home-brew RSN (real soon now) - as phpNuke/postnuke is more than we need. We did look at www.lanewsfactory.org as well - which is a simpler news/forum post/moderate solution - but even that did more than we needed" . On the new site, "The whole news posting is 4 simple php scripts - submit news, notify moderator, moderator posts, moderator rejects - would probably have taken me longer to configure a "real" portal solution in terms of switching off things we didn't want. lanewsfactory looks good for simple plug-in news/forums however - & is GPL"

The next day, Bajusz Tam�s (btami) reported that GNUe's own installation of DCL "doesn't work for me" . Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) noted "our server moved (in the physical sense) - stuff might still need t be set back up" . Peter said "DCL last I heard was not up yet" , adding "I think it was a problem related to trying to restore the back-up & upgrade to the new version (with Derek's security patches) at the same time" . Bajusz asked "so don't send patches to xxx-support@gnuenterprise.org yet?" Peter was not sure - "I would probably send to both xxx-support@gnuenterprise.org and info@gnue.org at the moment" .

The next day, Perry Lorier (Isomer) suggested "couldn't we just tag" the old version of GNUe Application Server (GEAS) "then cvs rm all the files. It's still available for reference - but newbies won't be trying to use it." Reinhard M�ller (reinhard) said "it's not only CVS - we have geas still in our download area AFAIK - and we have tons of references to geas spread all over our docs which seem to be not maintained" . Perry said that, for CMS, he was "addicted to Wiki - but that's probably not the best solution to store something like the GNUe docs - but if it was really easy (like Wiki) to fix docs, then regulars in here could keep them a bit more up to date" . Christian Selig (lupo) said that "CVS, sablotron and XHTML make a good CMS" . Peter said that "the new web site, unless i've missed anything, has no refs to the old geas anywhere - except in the downloads/previous directory" , which strongly urged people towards the current releases instead anyway.

Some days later, Jason Cater (jcater) asked "are we happy w/psu's web page i.e., are we ready to transfer DNS servers back to ash? or do we still need to do some finetuning first?" The consensus seemed to be to switch over, and fix any problems as they were found. Jan Ischebeck (siesel) asked "is everybody happy with the colors of the new website ?" Several people tried to come up with the worst colour schemes they could as possible alternatives.

Peter confirmed the location of the new test site, but could not get it to work - he kept getting the default Apache/Debian start page until he tried it in Lynx. He felt "Actually, the site looks quite good in Lynx" - or "as good as anything ever does" . Several people tried to access it with various browsers. Peter suggested that any patches should be sent to him as diffs, since DCL was still down and "we have no CVS for the web" as of time of writing.

4. Working on GNU Enterprise

22�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 23 Aug 2002"

Topics: Application Server, Common

People: Daniel Baumann

It was asked how to choose a part of GNUe to work on. Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said "the various pieces have TODO files in cvs...er, I am not aware of anything else that exists and I don't know how up to date they are" , noting that the bug list was maintained in DCL. Alternatively, he suggested asking on the gnue-dev mailing list, noting "appserver could always use help - common could use more rpc drivers" .

5. ebXML and e-business in Australia

25�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 26 Aug 2002"

People: Sacha Schlegel

Sacha Schlegel (SachaS) said that "today i was at a australian governement meeting. they are keen to get a ebXML registry/repository pilot project. to enable australian companies to get registered. One of ebXML goals is to get SMEs Small to Medium Enterprises hooked up to electronic business. Now the problem is: SMEs use their "beloved" SME software (myob in australia) and are not keen to change their system in order to participate with ebXML. So the idea is: Bring ebXML to the SMEs by providing a toolbox to their beloved SME software. Their beloved SME software is a running commercial GNUe with many features :) So keep going to develop GNUe and one day someone will add the tools to allow ebXML behind the scene. :)"

6. Using GNUe Application Server with phpGW

25�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 26 Aug 2002"

Topics: Application Server, Common

People: Adam Hull,�Jan Ischebeck,�Dan Kuykendall

Adam Hull (fixe) asked about GNUe Application Server "what language it is in, why gnue decided to write their own, what were other app servers lacking? how far along is the project?" Jan Ischebeck (siesel) noted that "its in python" - "its in early alpha stage, i.e. quite functional but lacking some important feature like transactions etc." Adam said he was looking at application servers for phpGroupware (phpGW) as he was concerned that phpGW "will not scale to enterprise level" but "idealy it would be nice to have phpgw as a front end for an enterprise app server" . He asked "can python scale?" Jan thought that python was at least as scalable as Java, which was often used for application servers. He noted that Dan Kuykendall (seek3r) had talked about writing "a PHP equivalence to the RPC abstraction in gnue-common" - he explained "Appserver is using gnue-common, which means access to almost all SQL92 compatible databases, and a modular RPC system." It was felt that re-writing GNUe Common in PHP was unecessary, as PHP clients (such as the GNUe phpForms client that Jan had already written) could just use the existing GNUe Common via RPC (remote procedure calls). The main reason for GNUe writing its own Application Server was the need to use completely free software - others, like jboss, were GPL (GNU Public License) in themselves, but had non-free dependencies like Java. Also, on functionality, GNUe wanted an Application Server that had RPC abstraction, Object to Relational mapping engines and a Business Rule Language abstraction, so that business rules could be written in any computer language there was a plug-in for, not just python. These last two points were longer term goals, but were still important.

7. GNUe on linuxfund

26�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Aug 2002"

People: Derek Neighbors

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) noted "anyone wishing to support GNUe to get a grant can go to linuxfund.org and register and then give your penguin pesos to gnue (the one submitted by lbergman). jerrit (ceo of linuxfund) is going to make sure that goes to GNUe project and not lbergman if we end up getting a grant" , as referred to in Issue�#42, Section�#11� (12�Aug�2002:�GNUe at Linux World Expo) . He was not sure the maximum number of 'penguin pesos' that could be allocated to one project - "it wouldnt let me allocate 2000 :)" He suggested "try 1900 and work my way down :)" .

8. wxGTK2 driver for Forms

26�Aug�2002�-�27�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Aug 2002"

Topics: Forms

People: Arturas Kriukovas,�James Thompson,�Jason Cater,�Aditya Gilra

Arturas Kriukovas (Arturas) said he had "tested wxGTK2 driver from Aditya - it looks, hm, unusuall, but pretty nice :)" He suggesting putting it in CVS near the wxGTK driver - "something like .../uidrivers/wxgtk/UIdriver.py - to make it possible to choose the interface via. 'client -u [interface name]'" James Thompson (jamest) said "if it's not using wx then it should not start with wx" . /uidrivers/gtk2/UIdriver.py was suggested as an alternative.

The next day, Arturas said "i believe you can try new gtk2 interface now - it should be working :)" Jason warned "we need to be a little more judicious about committing other people's patches - we really needed to get a copyright assignment first" . However, "it's not a big deal - I'm sure we'll get it" - "but for future reference that's a requirement for getting large patches into CVS - large = more than a few typo corrections" . Arrangements were agreed to get a FSF copyright assignment form to Aditya Gilra.

9. wxPython debugging whilst developing GNUe Designer

27�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 28 Aug 2002"

Topics: Designer

People: Jan Ischebeck,�Jason Cater,�Andrew Mitchell

Jan Ischebeck (siesel) asked "do you have any idea how to debug designer/wxpython in an easy way?" Prayer was suggested, but Jason Cater (jcater) suggested "lots of print statements" . Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) agreed - "print statements work for me - best captured into a file" . Jan asked "is there a way to get wxpython internal debugging statements?" Andrew noted that "wxpython is a slim python wrapper around a C++ lib - you could hack that if you were fool^Wbrave enough" Jan said he had "heard about an wxpython debbuging lib, and there seems to be some debug functions in wxwindows" .

10. Transparent blocks in Forms

27�Aug�2002�Archive Link: "[IRC] 28 Aug 2002"

Topics: Forms

People: Jason Cater,�Marcos Dione

Marcos Dione (StyXman) asked why transparent blocks existed. Jason Cater (jcater) said "they are for people who need them - not everyone's app will use them" Marcos asked "you mean, like some blocks that won't let the user change the focus to a entry ouside this block pressing <tab>, but would be able to do so using the mouse?" Jason clarfied "the user would still be able to change focus with the keyboard or with the mouse - with the next-block event (it's on the menu, and iirc is Page Down)" . Marcos said he had not spotted this, as "(we (optionally) supressed the menu :-/)" - this would need documenting

�

�

�

�

�

�

Sharon And Joy
�