On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 03:04:15PM +1300, Dru was heard to remark: > openoffice.org - ms office copy cat approach. I dont see open office > team been able to easily create a ms access replacement and i'd prefer > them to improve other parts of openoffice.
A couple of remarks: -- MS look-alike can be a big mistake. For example, I like eveolution, but they managed to copy some real cruddy parts, like the to-do list. Parts that MS itself will no-doubt ditch in the next version ... MS Access has some serious problems that should not be copied. There are high-end apps from e.g. Oracle that work much more nicely than MS Access. There is also Lotus Notes. > Ie. dwi, bond and gnomedb use glade as a common forms designer while The Lotus Notes forms designer is like a smash-up between AbiWord and Glade. You can place any button, widget, etc. anywhere in a document that has arbitrary text formatting, margins, fonts, etc. Today, we have this kind of ability in HTML (you can place an HTML FROM anywhere on a web page; hell you can even use javascript in a web page) but we still don't have that in abiword. (One of the great Lotus Notes emails was the infamous job satisfaction survey. The question "Are you satisfied with your job?" Two buttons you could push to answer: the Yes button, and the No button, which would skitter and jump out of the way every time you tried to position your mouse anywhere near it.) The point is that these emails were live documents, and the buttons were live, and they were connected to a remote database somwehere, where user responses were tallied. We're not there yet. > maybe sharing same reporting engine will also > help all the projects along. I'm concerned about the idea that the report generator is somehow an off-line batch processor. Take a look at the gnomedb report generator: it creates XML, good lord! With header and footer and colors! I'm sorry, but that is sooo wrong. Reports need to be thought of as the other half of forms. A "form" is a document where the use is queried for info. For example, the google home page is a "form". A "report" is how data returned from the database is presented to the user. For example, the result of a google search is a "report". Sometimes, "reports" are visually merged with "forms". For example, suppose you search for bugzilla bug 123. You see a "report" of bug 123, but that "report" is also a "form" which allows you to make modifications to bug 123. My point being that you could never build something like bugzilla from the the gnomedb report generator (and if I'm wrong, then I grossly misunderstand the gnomedb reports). The output of a report generator must be targeted to the same interface as the forms designer. In the case of dwi (and bond), this target is the glade widgets, although I argue here that it should also be a live AbiWord document. A report that is a static post-processed Abiword document is useless. -- pub 1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984 3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933 _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
