GNUe Traffic #76 For 12 Apr 2003 Editor: Peter Sullivan By Peter Sullivan "no clawing eyes out until after testing - then you have my blessing to rip off any of your body parts you'd like" Table Of Contents * Standard Format * Text Format * XML Source * Introduction * Threads Covered 1. 3 Apr 2003 Status of Application Server 2. 3 Apr 2003 - 5 Apr 2003 Fixing bugs in the pre-releases 3. 5 Apr 2003 Application Server and Javascript forms client 4. 6 Apr 2003 Foreign key look-ups in Forms 5. 7 Apr 2003 Application Server release and Debian packaging 6. 8 Apr 2003 QT GUI Driver for GNUe Introduction This covers the three main mailing lists for the GNU Enterprise (http:// www.gnuenterprise.org) project, plus the #gnuenterprise IRC channel. GNUe Traffic is now group-authored: if you'd like to join the team, let us know ( mailto:psu@burdonvale.co.uk) 1. Status of Application Server 3 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 03 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Application Server, Why GNUe? People: Henry Mason, James Thompson, Reinhard M?ller Henry Mason (deprogram) asked "how much is actually being done to the appserver? it seems like everyone is working on a 2-tier arrangement" . James Thompson (jamest) felt "that's not quite true - us 2 tier losers have less of a life than the appserver people" and "the goal is that forms/reports/designer just work w/ 3 tier" . Henry said he was a potential user for Application server as "i have a massive legacy application that needs to be reworked into a modern architecture - i'd like to put as much as possible into a middle tier" . Reinhard M?ller (reinhard) admitted that "appserver unfortunately has much less progress than i would want it to have" but James said "one thing that would help though is having someone like you using it - I know forms/reports/common are driven by jcater and my needs - and sometimes even a user request" . Reinhard agreed - "one thing that would help though is somebody that kicks my ass on a daily basis" . Henry volunteered to help, saying "i have to get more familiar w. python - :> it seems pretty transparent" . James explained the principles behind the copyright assignment of all GNUe code to the Free Software Foundation. Henry understood, but warned "it may be difficult to persuade my boss that he needs to pay me to hack open src" - on the other hand, "if i write a closed package he will be faced with maintaining it after i quit" . 2. Fixing bugs in the pre-releases 3 Apr 2003 - 5 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 03 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Forms People: Derek Neighbors, James Thompson, Jason Cater, Jeff Bailey Further to Issue #75, Section #5 (1 Apr 2003: New pre-releases available for testing) , Derek Neighbors (derek) noted that the "commit enabled bug" now "appears to be fixed, the only possible problem would be that if you had something with only one value. that is the 'commit' doesnt enable until you exit a field on the new record (which is way better than it not enabling until you exit the record itself)" . He personally considered "it fixed, but wanted that side note" . The other bug - "foreign key populating all lookups is _not_ fixed - instead of it populating with the value being committed on commit, it now populates with the previous record on commit" . This was with the 9th set of pre-releases. Later, Derek (revDeke) said "if you can solve the foriegn key one and do a pre10 (along with your fixes to designer i see committed) i can try to give all the tools a nice thorough butt whooping when i get home" - "i hope to at a minimum tonight test some navigator stuff and the 'schema scripts'" . Two days later (http://www.gnuenterprise.org/irc-logs/gnue-public.log.05Apr2003 ) , James Thompson (jamest) said that he was "99% certain it'll be this weekend" that version 0.5.0 would be officially released - he and Jason Cater (jcater) had done some final bug-squishing the day before. There was still one outstanding bug, "and docs need updated" . Jeff Bailey (jbailey) asked whether GNUe Small Business (gnue-sb) had been updated to use the 0.5.0 GNUe tools yet. James confirmed "they ported it" . He had hoped that the 0.5.0 release of the tools would have included "a stable win32 ui dirver in there too - but we won't hold up release on that - it's been too long" . As it was, he was "really happy with 0.5.0 - i was worried about stability - but i think we're at or above 0.4.x" . 3. Application Server and Javascript forms client 5 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 05 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Application Server, Forms People: Jan Ischebeck, Reinhard M?ller Jan Ischebeck (siesel) asked "are you ok with releaseing appserver 0.0.3?" Reinhard M?ller (reinhard) was - "we haven't had a release for a long time" and, as Jan pointed out, "its important to have a release which works with the newest "gnue-Common"" . Jan asked "should we have documentation for the api of the language interface?" Reinhard agreed - "maybe as a part of a "guide to writing applications with appserver"" . Jan noted that he had "updated the jsclient to use the new appserver api and I'm thinking about building the language interface for javascript" This was already working, but "I just think about moving to a language interface like API, to provide an appserver language interface in another programming language." 4. Foreign key look-ups in Forms 6 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 06 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Forms, Common People: Christian Selig, Jan Ischebeck Christian Selig (lupo) asked how to set up "master / detail forms - i have a list of customers and a list of countries. there is a customer.country_id and a countries.id which are linked. In the customer form, the country shall be choosable with a dropdown menu" . Jan Ischebeck (siesel) said that if "you just want to choose one country and store its id into customer.country_id" this did not "need master detail. you just need to define the countries datasource, and create a dropdown entry" . There was an example of this in the connection.gfd (GNUe Forms Definition) - you just had to specify the datasource for the foreign key, the foreign key field itself and any fk_description - this "is the part which is shown to the user (i.e. in your case country name)" . Christian confirmed "now it works :)" 5. Application Server release and Debian packaging 7 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 07 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Application Server People: James Thompson, Reinhard M?ller, Jeff Bailey James Thompson (jamest) said "when releasing last night the new common I bundled up a appserver too and put up as a release - but I didn't know the stat (notice no official announcements of the release :) IIRC you guys were ready for a release to match the new common - should I leave it up or pull it?" Reinhard M?ller (reinhard) said "we haven't reached a specific milestone yet with appserver - but it's been a long time since the last release and a lot of incompatible changes - so the release is good for 0.0.3" . He thanked James "for the effort of doing it" . Jeff Bailey (jbailey) asked about the status of the release. James said "released - just not announced" ,and he encouraged Jeff, as the project's Debian package maintainer to "bundle her up and slap her in sid" . Jeff asked whether he should do a first Debian package for Application Server - "I'm guessing no. (since he told me not to bother before)" Reinhard said not yet - "i think we if we package the next release for appserver - we will still be early enough for sarge :)" . 6. QT GUI Driver for GNUe 8 Apr 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 08 Apr 2003" Summary By Peter Sullivan Topics: Common People: Jason Cater Jason Cater (jcater) said he had not done any further work on the Forms qt GUI client recently, as he had been working on the 0.5.0 release - "but it was *really* close - combo boxes weren't working right and the initial form size wasn't quite right. I hadn't looked at check boxes yet, so I know they don't work - but basic entry stuff was good. I hit a serious limitation with the QT3 library and mouse support though - so I'm having issues when a user clicks inside a text box to move the cursor" . Sharon And Joy Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.