[Gnue-announce] 0.4.2 releases of Forms, Designer, Common.

[Peter Sullivan]

The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce a new release of
it's enterprise application development suite.  This release
includes:

* GNUe Forms 0.4.2
* GNUe Designer 0.4.2
* GNUe Common 0.4.2

This is the next point release of the 0.4.x stable branch.

GNUe-Forms is a platform and UI-independent forms system. It
reads an XML-based forms definition and creates GUIs for Win32,
GTK, Curses (text) and, soon, 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 has support for form creation 
wizards... answer a few questions, attach your form
to one or more database tables, 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, Application Server, 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.
It also defines and implements 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. They are available in 
source form from our website at
http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/current.php.

The tools have been tested and are known to run on:
* GNU/Linux (RedHat 6.x/7.x/8.x, Debian 2.x/3.x,   Slackware 8.0, ...)
* Windows 95/98/2000/XP/NT
* Solaris 8.0
* FreeBSD 4.x

The main aims of this point release are to do some final tidying-up 
before the big push for the 0.5.0 releases. This includes bringing into 
the main code base many of the useful changes that our friends at Via 
Libre working on Project Papo have written.

Note that, at the moment, this release is available in source code form 
only (*.tar.gz and *.zip). We will look at getting Microsoft Windows 
.exe and Debian GNU/Linux package versions over the next few weeks, 
although given the progress that 0.5.0 is making in CVS, this may 
overtake it...
So our current recommendations would be:

* For Debian GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows users who want an 
automatic install: 0.4.1
* For other platforms, or for Debian and Windows users who are happy to 
install from source: 0.4.2

CVS HEAD (what will be 0.5.0) is currently not recommended, even for 
testing purposes, as there is still some breakage/refactoring to 
resolve, but it should be back into a state where willing testers can 
usefully use it soon.

The changes since 0.4.1 include:

Forms
-----

* Backported various fixes from CVS HEAD (the proto-0.5.0)
* Reimplemented sloppyQuery tag
* Updates to get curses mostly working; lots of menubar work
* Implemented isSaved(), isEmpty(), lastRecord(),   firstRecord(), 
executeQuery(), commit(), rollback() based   upon diff sent by Papo team

Designer
--------

* Backported various fixes from CVS HEAD (the proto-0.5.0)
* Applied patches for various report wizards, including   label and 
Mail Merge wizards

Common
------

* Backported various fixes from CVS HEAD (the proto-0.5.0)
* Fix for custom authenticator support
* Updates to get curses mostly working
* Added in papo's null and not null conditionals
* Fixes to configuration loading added support for
  a global [default] section to config files
* Fix for buggy mysqldb drivers < version 0.9.2a2

--
Peter Sullivan <address@hidden>