0.1.0 Releases of Forms, Designer, and Common

[James Thompson]

During the mailing list migration we noticed that our Nov 21st release
announcement never made it onto our lists.  A copy of that accouncement
follows...

The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce the release of GNUe-Forms
0.1.0, GNUe-Designer 0.1.0, and GNUe-Common 0.1.0.

GNUe-Forms is a platform and UI-independent forms system. It reads an
XML-based forms definition and creates GUIs for Win32, GTK, and, soon,
Curses and HTML. It has a fully data-aware widget set and can be used in
both 2-tier and n-tier environments.

GNUe-Designer is the IDE for the GNUe tools. It allows you to visually
layout your forms in a RAD-style environment. Designer has a builtin forms
client, so you can quickly test your forms while still in Designer.
Designer also now has support for form creation wizards... answer a few
questions, attach your form to a table, select the fields to include, and,
voila, a basic form is created.

GNUe-Common is the basis for the GNUe tools, such as Forms, Reports, and
Designer. It implements a database-abstraction layer that provides support
for most major databases. A builtin XML-to-Object parser and Object-to-XML
marshaller are used by Forms, Reports, and Designer to save and read
Forms/Report definitions to and from an XML file. Work has begun on an
RPC-abstraction layer that will allow server processes to define their
public methods once and have them available to CORBA, XML-RPC, SOAP, and
DCOM clients.

All of these releases are targeted at developers. The three products are
available in source form from our website at http://www.gnue.org/

For the first time, we also have Windows installers that include all the
basic dependencies -- you only have to download a single setup.exe! The
Installers include support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC.


GNUe-Forms 0.1.0, Designer 0.1.0, and Common 0.1.0 have been tested and
are known to run on:
 o GNU/Linux (RedHat 6.x/7.x, Debian 2.x, Slackware 8.0, ...)
 o Windows 95/98/2000/XP/NT
 o Solaris 8.0
 o FreeBSD 4.x

Changes to GNUe-Forms 0.1.0:
 o Removed Python 1.5.2 support. (Python 2.x is now required.)
 o Numerous performance improvements
 o Migration to new GNUe common data driver model:
 o Most major databases are now databases supported (See below)
 o Master/detail support has been fine-tuned
 o Suport for a new trigger/event: "On-Print"
 o Support for Win32 platforms (binary installer)
 o Numerous bug fixes

Changes to GNUe-Designer 0.1.0:
 o Added support for new features in GNUe-Forms 0.1.0.
 o Includes Wizard support/Automatic form generation. Wizards are simple
 o  Python scripts that conform to a basic design. A sample wizard is
 o  included.
 o The tree-view now shows icons.
 o Reorder-by-location added (Changes the tab-order based on screen
 o  position)
 o Added support for "deprecated" attributes. If your form already uses a
 o  deprecated attribute, Designer will still let you use it. However,
 o  Designer will not let you create a new form with the deprecated
 o  attribute.
 o First attempt at mouse support for positioning widgets
 o Support for Win32 platform (binary installer)
 o Startup warnings dialogs
 o Many bug fixes and performance enhancements
 o Persistant session information -- Designer remembers the state (window
 o  sizes, position, etc) from the last session and restores them when
 o  Designer is re-opened.

Changes to GNUe-Common 0.1.0:
 o New Database/Backend Support (Not all tested)
 o DB2, Informix, Ingres, Interbase, ODBC, Oracle,
 o PostgreSQL (pygresql, popy, pypgsql, psycopg)
 o MySQL, SAP-DB, Sybase, SQL-Relay
 o Changes required by newer forms, reports, and designer
 o Start of RPC abstraction support
 o Start of support for Formatting Masks
 o Misc bug fixes and enhancements

In other news, GNUe-Reports is coming along nicely in CVS. Expect to see a
release "Real Soon." Also, an HTML UI driver for Forms is well underway in
CVS (thanks madlocke!). This driver runs on top of Webware
(http://webware.sf.net.) Also, trigger/event support is being reworked and
hopefully plans for it will be finalized soon.