Slashdot Mirror

I use a Bittorrent client that runs on curses. No fancy-schmancy Tcl for me!

Not necessarily so. Tcl/Tk has had a Curses extension for years... ;-).

Answering my own post:

    http://dba.openoffice.org/drivers/sqlite/
    http://oooauthors.org/en/FAQs/Database/connectors/ 20041114b
    http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/html/

but I'd like to hear from people working on it. Will there be an OOo package with SQLite or something in there, and no Java? (E.g. on Debian and Ubuntu?)

For example, there's no other platform that has as many high quality, cross platform database drivers

perldoc DBI
ODBC

Sorry, that doesn't stack up. On PerlDoc DBI, what if I need to connect to Pervasive 2000 (formerly BTrieve). This is a VERY popular database for converting mainframes. With Perl:DBI and unixODBC, I'm out of luck. With JDBC, the vendor provides support. Even if I want to connect to the big name databases with unixODBC, I have to pay for third party drivers. The vendor isn't going to support me. And I still have no support if I go outside of the big name databases.

It's a nice try, but only ODBC on windows comes even close to the amount of database support provided by Java.

What's the need for them all in an office suit? You need one mediocre-but-tiny implementation for Access-like features, and the ability to connect to real servers.

You just said it. "The ability to connect to real servers." JDBC allows you to do this for free, and get vendor support. This is a big point when you consider the value of corporate data stored in an Oracle, DB2, or Pervasive database. In addition, the smaller Java databases are all good options for embedding into OpenOfice whereas there are practically no non-Java options. The only one I found was SQLite, and they don't ship an ODBC driver. (Although there is a third party experimental driver, but it is not mature enough for use. Interestingly, that same third party produces a JDBC driver for SQLite.)

In F/OSS world, anything is "more unbiquitous" than Java - because no freeNIX ships with a real java implementation.

No worries. As I remember, OOo ships with the JRE. :-)

this [ch-werner.de] is not. It's a port of Tk (the Tcl graphical toolkit) to curses, and it is truly excellent.

Well this looks interesting. Is there a screen shot of something reasonably sophisticated around? I ran your basic hello world two buttons and a field example and it worked ok but it's hard to get a feel for how navigation is handled. Are there some good example apps to try? I tried to get the make xconfig tk gui for configuring the kernel but it bails right away without any informative sorts of messages.

this is not. It's a port of Tk (the Tcl graphical toolkit) to curses, and it is truly excellent.

It's an add-on for Tcl which uses almost the same syntax as the Tk toolkit, but renders using curses. If you're familiar with Tk and it's widgets, you'll be right at home with CK.