[Kexi] Fwd: Kexi development

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jaroslaw Staniek <staniek at kde.org>
Date: 2009/12/22
Subject: Re: Kexi development
To: Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au>

2009/12/22 Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au>:
> Hi, Jaroslaw.
>
> I came to Kexi 1.1.3 (running through Gnome on Ubuntu 9.10) after a long period of struggling to make sqlite usable with its various SQL-type front-ends. Too hard! I'm a zoologist, and I now use Kexi to manage and report from 4 tables:
>
> - a ca 500-record table of scientific names
> - a ca 5200-record of specimen collecting events
> - two ca 5000-record tables of specimen lots in museums. These two tables each share a field with the names and events tables, so that I can query a specimen lot in either table and also get full name and event data for the records queried.
>
> Kexi is excellent! It's at least as easy to use as FileMaker Pro, and I find it much easier on the eyes (see attached screenshot).
>

Dear Bob,
It is great to hear kind words from you, and I am glad you have found
use case for Kexi.

> I would be very interested to hear where Kexi 2 is going, and would be happy to be an end-user tester, if you need one.

Kexi 2.2. will be the firtst release in series 2.x, to be shipped with
KOffice 2.2 around May 2010.
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KOffice/2.2/Release_Plan

It is still vital project, vital within KOffice and KDE.

Regarding tests, so far users that do not compile the program have
limited access to it. Once Kexi is released as beta version so I
forecast Ubuntu may ship it eg. within Kubuntu.
It is also good idea to find contributor that will create binary
packages for Kexi earlier, i.e. also for alpha versions.
There wouldn't be any conflicting version with 1.1.x series.

What I think about is to request some support from the community for
creating operating system image for virtualbox (or vmware) with test
version of Kexi. I guess such tool could be good for testers...

> At this early stage, the only items on my wish-list are probably already on your to-do list (http://kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php@CurrentTasks_jstaniek.html).

The pages are quite outdated as you may imagine, as a temporary tool
we use http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kexi
I am sorry about not communicated that clearly.

New pages that probably may be interesting for you are as follows:

http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kexi/Releases/Kexi_2.2
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kexi/TODOs - includes long-term TODOs

> These are:
>
> 1. allow relationship-building without having to create a query

This is a TODO after 2.2, the reason for delay is that different
database backends have different behaviour regarding relationships.
And relationships are quite hard to glue well to the GUI. The top
priority is any feature is to assure users will not lose their designs
and data.

> 2. allow saving of a query as a database object [So far as I can see, I can only save a query result by exporting it to .csv]

I think you mean saving the results of running the queries?
Something like "Data insertion query (INSERT INTO)" or "Table creation
query (CREATE TABLE)" (also: DELETE query).
That could be good idea indeed -  I see a lot of uses for that (I've
been using that a lot in my MS Access days in the previous century ;)
).

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org)
 KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek