[GRLUG] OpenOffice.org as Access replacement

[Benjamin Flanders]

Well I started hacking with OO.org base and I have had no crashes as
of yet.  Base uses hsqldb which I believe is comparable to sqlite.  I
decided to try Base out because my work uses a lot of spreadsheets
that I would love to connect to our database(AS400) and automate a lot
of stuff.

Right now my app has a database back end designed using Base.  I have
a few Basic functions that query that db and work with that data, and
a dialog that does nothing but pop up a message box saying "HI".

I'm pretty happy so far, but the documentation is pretty lacking.

Thanks for all the suggestions.  I hadn't heard of most of them.  Now
that I am starting to get back into the programming groove, I have a
lot more ideas that I'd like to flesh out.

RoR  and python is something that I have tried in the past, but this
was a time when my programming mojo was on the decline and I wasn't
motivated to work on it.  Looks like python in particular has a lot of
projects using it now, as evidenced by the ones you all have brought
to light as well as OO.org using it as a scripting engine.  It seems
that knowing it would be very useful.


Share and Enjoy
Ben



On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 14:27 -0500, Michael Mol wrote:
>> Back when I was taking a database class at Ferris, I tried using OO.org
>> Base to create a prototype for what I needed to put in DB2. Not a
>> functional prototype, just a GUI visualization of the tables and
>> relationships.
>> Without even getting to the "run a query" state of things, I had Base
>> crash a rather large number of times. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
>>   However, all that was three-four years ago, and they may have fixed
>> things up since then.
>
> Supposedly OOBase has been overhauled.  But I haven't really tried it in
> recent versions.
>
>> Just about every general programming language has database bindings
>> these days.
>
> True.  That part is easy.  Creating a UI that doesn't make the user want
> to attack the developer with a chain-saw is hard.
>
>> If all you want is something that could be serviced by
>> Access, pick a language you're familiar with and use its DB bindings to
>> put your data into an SQLite back-end. (SQLite can be more or less
>> summarized as a single-program database that runs within your process
>> and saves your data to a file on disk.)  SQLite itself is
>> cross-platform; It's used in Firefox, a variety of programs on my Linux
>> desktop at home, and we use it as a processing engine in a diagnostics
>> analyzer Windows app we built at work.
>
> +1 for SQLite.  It is drop-dead easy [for real, not 'drop dead easy'
> like MySQL - where easy-to-use is LAMP-lamer speak meaning
> i-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about-because-I've-never-used-anything-else].  SQLite is great for local applications, it avoids need for any services.
>
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