Frank,
Thank you for the response, in short order I might say given you recent
return from a vacation.
I am wondering is there someplace that one could find a road map say of
features that might be forthcoming in Base. If there is not, then any
ideas on if that kind of thing is being looked at serioulsy.
For example I would be very interested in any plans to create a JDBC for
the embedded database. Another would be that given your work as mentor
on the summer of code project I am sure people are quite interested in
the possibility that Jasper might become the defacto report engine?
Andrew
Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems Germany wrote:
Hi Andrew,
thanks for your honest and open words, this is something I surely
appreciate.
Let me say in advance that we aren't too far apart in a lot of your
items, but that I nonetheless would not agree to your "mostly unusable"
judgement (which is what I read - in other words - in your mail; no
offense intended).
For the question of our target audience: Well, this is implied by the
target audience of OOo as a whole. One major goal of OpenOffice.org 2.0,
which you can read all over the place at oo.o, was "Micrsoft
Interoperability". Refining the pure catchword here, it was "make
Microsoft Office users move to OpenOffice.org". A lot has been done
there, often discussed very controversial (for instance the "make us
look and feel and sound like MSO at nearly all costs"-paradigm followed
in the main applications), but all for the sake of potential
MSO-migrators feeling as comfortable as possible in OOo from the
beginning (it's about the famous migration and retraining costs).
This greater goal also implied the goal for Base - give the user
something competing with MS Access. People, stop the laughing ;) - we
all know that we're not there, not even remotely.
Since one major strength of MSA is the capability to create
database-driven applications (which don't look like databases at all),
the target audience of Base should (should! see below) be the developers
of such applications - this in fact is my serious and deepest belief.
OOo Base 2.0 does not allow for this audience, for a number of reasons,
of which you mentioned a lot: the "forms are text documents"-problem,
the missing macro capabilities, the immense complexity of (important
parts of) the API, and so on.
For quite a while now, the OOo team (the Sun part of it, honestly) is
discussing what we (!) think should be the goals for post-2.0, and I
constantly argue that we should make Base a platform for application
development, exactly for the "applications" targeted at the groups of 3
to 9 users you're mentioning.
Well, I also know that OOo 2.0 Base is *not* the right tool for
developing database-driven applications. What we did as a first step was
exactly the "self-contained database file" feature, which was a
requirement for everything else.
This feature itself has its quirks (issue 54609 being one of them), but
I don't think they make Base as such useless. In fact, I would have much
more confidence to recommend Base 2.0 to my father (as an arbitrary
example for a non-computer guy) for his, say, video collection than I
would have had for Base 1.x. Okay, he would still have to call me for
some things (which means there's still enough need for support), but I
believe he could do quite well - alas, better than with 1.x, for sure.
I agree that Base 2.0 is not for the "developer" (apostrophised 'cause
potentially every end user is a "developer") who wants to create the
above-mentioned data-driven applications, but I nonetheless think we
already have an audience aside the application development.
Finally: Yes, there's a huge amount of work to be done after 2.0
(wouldn't it be boring if there weren't?), but we made a first good
(IMO) step, which I'm not too unhappy with :)
Reards
Frank
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