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Does anyone know why this happened? MySQL Front was my favourite front end for MySQL, much better than the one on MySQL.com IMHO, so I'm curious as to why it was killed.

• Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
• Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is
• VLC - Free media player
• OpenOffice.org - I should stop doing these descriptions, its not as if youve heard of these things before!
• GIMP for windows - Yup, the infernal/eternal image editor
• Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
• Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port
• Thunderbird - Mail client
• Firefox - Web browser
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF Reader
• PDFcreator - GPL PDF print driver for windows
• MessengerPro (Clickatell) - Non free SMS sender for windows, company does good bulk buy sms rates, i buy 500 at a time for less than $5
• Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot SS - For the essentials in life
• Topstyle - Free version of the excellent CSS editor for webdevelopment, if anyone knows a good free alternative, im open to suggestions :)
• SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet! (I have, Filezilla it is excellent AND fully GPL, none of this non free shit, bub. :-) )
• MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(
• Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC -, like you mentioned, Free media player is a great media player, it blew me away. Better then Window's media player, and I know that my porno viewing habits are not going straight to Bill Gates.

One you didn't mention is Filezilla which is a good GPL ftp program instead of SmartFTP if you want to try another one out. (I must confess I use LeechFTP since I haven't gotten use to Filezilla just yet, although if you are into hosting files Filezilla is even better).

I'd like to recommend MySQL-Front. Great piece of software.

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I was going to suggest MySQLFront, but you beat me to it. :-)

When I first started using MySQL a few years ago, I wanted to find a nice GUI front end for it, partly because relational databases are designed to hold tables of data, and I just think it's nicer to have that data presented as something looking like a spreadsheet application rather than ascii in a console. Sometimes, GUIs are just nicer tools, and for me this is one of those cases.

More importantly, I wanted to set up the company database so that other staff could work with the system in a way roughly resembling Microsoft Access, which was being used by some people in other contexts -- but I didn't want it to acctually be Access (if only to make it clear that this wasn't just something running on their desktop), so that ruled out ODBC.

Of all the many MySQL GUIs I found -- this would have been 2000 or so -- none of them was half as well done as MySQLFront. It was small, fast, attractive, and functional. The others either had clumsy interfaces, were ugly Tk monstrosities (if ugly & broken is the price to be paid for portability ...portability isn't so important), or just couldn't do certain things with the database. MySQLFront was a dream compared to the others.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the guy developing it, Ansgar Becker, abandoned it abruptly in the middle of 2002, and it got very hard to find copies of the application after that. The last version released was 2.4 or something, but copies of 2.5 turned up, and that was it.

And that makes the current status of MySQLFront very confusing -- all of a sudden, the site is offering downloads of version 3.0. Where did this come from? Is Ansgar involved again? Did someone get their hands on the source code? I don't get it....

Actually, answering my own question, it looks like his website explains all -- in German:

Im November 2003 fragte mich N. Hoyer, ob er den Namen "MySQL- Front" ubernehmen durfte. Nach ein wenig Hin und Her schlug ich dann ein. Ab diesem Zeitpunkt steht MySQL-Front in einer vollstandig neu entwickelten Version 3.0 zur Verfugung. Die Websitewww.mysqlfront.de ist weiterhin die Anlaufstelle fur Download, Forum usw.

According to Babelfish,

In November 2003 N. Hoyer asked me whether he might take over the name "MySQL front". After a little back and forth I hit then. Starting from this time MySQL front is available in a completely again developed version 3.0. The Website www.mysqlfront.de is further the approach place for Download, forum etc..

So I guess it's a new application under the same name?

In any case, it's alive again, and that's great. It's a shame that it's Windows only, but this really is by far the best graphical MySQL frontend that I know of, and I've tried many. If the new developer[s] wants to, or the source gets opened, maybe we'll see versions of it for Linux and Macintosh some day. But just having it revived on Windows is great news...

Until then, I'll stick to MySQLFront (slow link). It does a pretty good job for windoze users. I do hope the new GUI is an open-source tool.

It's called MySQL. With MySQL-Front.

Well i guess I'm walking into your trap, but... have you tried MySQLfront? I'm guessing you have as it's not obscure, but what didn't you like about it?

For me it does almost everything I need out of a frontend (and certainly stomps mightily on the piece of shit that is MySQLGUI). And yes I went through all that evaluating too, and MySQLfront came up way on top - edit data, table design, server management etc etc