It would be handy to have some developer tools that don't cost an
arm and a leg. My question is first, "Does anyone know if these tools
exist?", and second, "If not, are we interested in a subproject to
house them?". Until we upgrade, we can use the Avalonia project that
we have at SourceForge to handle these things.
1) Database definition managment. It would be Really Great (TM) to
have a tool that took an XML representation of a group of tables
and views, and spat out the DB specific SQL commands to generate
the database. It would be even better if this tool could be
embedded in ANT! The other side of the tool would be the GUI that
you used to create the XML markup. Another Really Great (TM) thing
would be to handle the initial values that needed to be inserted
into the database to make it useable.
2) Configuration GUI. Let's face it, building a configuration file
by hand is only enjoyable by people who know what they are doing.
For the rest of us, we need a GUI to help out. One particular
utility we can use is Xybrix (http://jbrix.org/kits/xybrix). It
takes XForms (or a close proximation) and generates the GUI
dynamically. That way, components can have the XForms definition
with them and Xybrix can generate the entry for it.
3) Component Server. When you want to really make something a bit
easier to maintain, you want your tools to manage the monitoring
and notifications of updates. That way you can always have the
most current version of a Component. This may work better for
Blocks, but it's an idea we had a long time ago (hense the
blockinfo descriptor files, etc.)
To me, the first one is the most important--esp. since the last
couple of days has been spent tediously taking an Informix schema
dump, and massaging the output to work with PostgeSQL. PAINFUL
AND BEST TO BE AVOIDED IF POSSIBLE. Commercial tools that manage
all that for you are more than $1000 USD, and many times are quite
clunky to use.
--
"Those who would trade liberty for
temporary security deserve neither"
- Benjamin Franklin
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