[Gnue-announce] New releases available (0.5.3 series)

[Jason Cater]

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

    * GNUe Forms 0.5.3 
    * GNUe Reports 0.1.4 
    * GNUe Designer 0.5.3 
    * GNUe AppServer 0.0.6 
    * GNUe Common 0.5.3 

GNUe-Forms is a platform and UI-independent forms system. It reads an
XML-based forms definition and creates GUIs for Win32, GTK 2, and, soon,
Curses (text), QT 3.0, and HTML. It has a fully data-aware widget set and
can be used in both 2-tier and n-tier environments. 

GNUe-Reports is a platform and output-independent reporting system. It
reads an XML-based report definition and generates arbitrary XML output
that can further be translated into any format for which there is an
adapter. GNUe Reports currently has outputs for Text, HTML, and CSV --
with PDF, Postscript, and Gnumeric/Excel formats in the works. Reports can
output directly to a file, as an email attachment, to a printer, or to a
HylaFax server. This version introduces native "Label" support. 


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. Basic support for
schema creation is also included. 

GNUe AppServer is the core of the n-tier variant of the GNU Enterprise
system. To the front end (be it GNUe Forms, GNUe Reports or any other
tool), it provides user-defineable business objects with arbitary fields
and methods. While transforming access to those fields and methods into
database communication and calling of scripts, it cares about stability,
security, speed, and consistency. 

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. The products are
available in source form from our website at 

  http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/current.php 

Debian packages for "unstable" have also been created. They are already
part of the official Debian distribution. 

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/sid, Slackware 8.x,
Gentoo) 
 * Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP/NT 
 * MacOS X (via the available X interface) 
 * Solaris 8/9 
 * FreeBSD 4.x/5.x 

The tools require Python 2.0 or better to run (Python 2.2+ recommended.)
GNUe Designer requires wxPython 2.4 or better to run. 

New features in GNUe-AppServer 0.0.6:
* Support for server-side procedures
* Much improved Python language interface
* Server-side data cache
* New program gnue-gsdgen to create .gsd files from the class repository
* More sample forms
* Miscellaneous bug fixes

New features in GNUe-Common 0.5.3:
* New database driver for cvs files (read only)
* Improved code (trigger/procedures) interface
* Restructured datasource interface
* Much improved gnue-schema program 
* New gnue-import program to merge data from .gsd files into a running
database
* Misc bug fixes

New features in GNUe-Designer 0.5.3:
* Support for gnue-common's new datasources API
* Misc Enhancements / Bug Fixes

New features in GNUe-Forms 0.5.3:
* Support for gnue-common's new datasources API
* Misc Enhancements / Bug Fixes

New features in GNUe-Reports 0.1.4:
* Support for gnue-common's new datasources API
* Misc Enhancements / Bug Fixes

-- 
Jason Cater
GNU Enterprise