The GNU Enterprise team is proud to announce a new release of it's enterprise application development suite. This release includes:
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 Navigator is a menuing system for GNUe Forms and Reports. It presents a consistent menuing interface (in GUI or Text) based on an XML "process definition." GNUe Navigator uses the GNUe Forms or GNUe Reports clients to run the actual forms and reports, so these corresponding tools must be installed.
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:
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 0.0.7:
New features in GNUe-Common 0.5.4:
New features in GNUe-Designer 0.5.4:
New features in GNUe-Forms 0.5.4:
New features in GNUe-Reports 0.1.5:
New features in GNUe-Navigator 0.0.7: