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Glom beta 1 release

Submitted by murraycu on Fri, 2006-03-10 02:20. GNOME
GNOME

Glom allows normal people to design databases and their user interfaces. It requires no use of SQL and no programming. It's nearing a 1.0 release, so it's ready for some serious testing. Glom 0.9.8 is beta 1.

Features

Glom 1.0 will have the following features

  • Add and remove tables
  • Define fields in tables: number, text, boolean, date, time, and image
  • Define relationships between tables
  • Define field calculations with python
  • Define field lookups
  • Define default field formatting which can be overriden later.
  • List and details views, with automatic layout when resizing.
  • Related records portals on the details view.
  • Related Fields on list and details views.
  • Dropdown lists of choices for field entry.
  • Open and Find buttons next to foreign keys (used by relationships).
  • Find mode: Using the existing list and details layouts, with a built-in full text search.
  • Reports: Simple reports with group-by and summary parts.
  • Per-table user/groups access rights.
  • Scripting: Add a button to the details view to run a python script.
  • Internationalization: Translate titles of tables, fields, layout items, relationships, reports, etc.

Additional features are planned for the future.

Screenshots

You can see some of this functionality in action in the screenshots. And Glom has a an example file that shows how it might be used.

Download

Glom is currently available in Ubuntu's unstable "Dapper" version. People are working on packages for Fedora. You can download the source, but using a prebuilt package is highly recommended.

I want to know about any bugs you can find, particularly crashes. Please try to reproduce the problem and describe how to do so in a Glom bug report. I've fixed heaps of bugs over the last few months, but there must be some left.

Setting up your Postgres server appropriately is still too difficult. The postgres setup information is a bit of a hack to just get it working.

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Improve libgda to have support to virtualy "any" RDBMS

Submitted by esodan on Sat, 2006-03-11 21:30.

As you sed in your comments Murray, libgda doesn't abstract all you need to run Glom; but why you don't work in the libgda to make it'll support all you need?, may other projects or derived from Glom can take that and have a powerfull library for RDBMS abstraction.

priorities

Submitted by murraycu on Sun, 2006-03-12 04:45.

Because there are more important things to do.

It really kicks the llama's ass by Anonymous George
With Django? by Anonymous George

Sorry

Submitted by sanmarcos on Fri, 2006-03-10 03:55.

Seems amazing.. but no MySQL support? sorry. it is the most used open source DB , afaik, please support it.

Follow SQL standards by Anonymous George

MySQL support

Submitted by murraycu on Fri, 2006-03-10 04:08.

Please do the work. It's quite substantial, and not that useful to people who don't care about technical implementation. So it's not a high priority.

I thought Glom used libgda

Submitted by TopDown on Fri, 2006-03-10 10:52.

I thought Glom used libgda for accessing databases? Or rather, I remember you discussing it on the mailing list... did you change your mind?

Not all SQLs are the same

Submitted by murraycu on Fri, 2006-03-10 14:41.

It does use libgda. libgda doesn't abstract everything.

All SQLs are very different

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2006-03-10 17:45.

You have to remember, Glom doesn't just need to abstract reading and writing data, but also doing create and alter tables/indexes/etc. This differs a lot of server to server and there are tons os little quirks waiting for you to stumble on them.

I'm sure MySQL could be supported, but I don't blame him for not doing this for 1.0. Like he said in his blog, "development accelerated when I decided not to waste time making it impossibly generic and über-adaptable."

(http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2006/03/10/glom-beta-1/)

I'm sure MySQL could be

Submitted by TopDown on Fri, 2006-03-10 18:39.

I'm sure MySQL could be supported, but I don't blame him for not doing this for 1.0.

Neither do I. I was under the impression that libgda abstracted (at least to a large degree) things like table creation/alteration and indexes.

Usefull

Submitted by DigitALL on Fri, 2006-03-10 03:28.

Wow...this could be very usefull!

Martin Medina
martin[dot]digitall[at]gmail[dot]com
www.digitallred.com.ar