What's new, based on identica notes:

• Thoughts on deploying SQLite turned out to be work in progress. Valuable input from our distro friends. A special wiki page has been created. See the last item of this entry
• KoReport, Kexi's rpt backend has undergone some refactoring to make it more generic.
• Fix number 1, charts working again in the designer.
  
• Working through the huge list of issues krazy has found with the kexi codebase, not glamorous, but necessary!
• Refactored the report renderers, and given better class name, to make the report library suitable for adoption over all of KOffice.
• Do you want well working MSAccess to Kexi converter? It's up to you - request it!
• KOffice now has a suite-wide reporting library! (placed in koffice/libs/koreports/)
• Kexi switched to "system" SQLite again. We want to play with distros well, but will check SQLite features at compilation to maintain high quality standards.

(brought to you by Adam and myself)

"There's nothing easier" -- you say -- about packaging and deploying SQLite. "Just take the software with default settings and package as a shared lib plus SQLite shell".

It's not that simple.

With 2010 we've started to employ identica (then connected to Twitter and Facebook) as an channel for our live changelog at the {power}user level. Here's the dump for the past ~30 days (oh I should have used an XSLT).

• We're replacing serialized QFont attrs with ODF equivalents in Kexi Reports file format; e.g. fo:font-family; it's extension of OpenRPT
• Finally we're still embedding SQLite as many options are not set in distros, e.g. SECURE DELETE should be the default http://bit.ly/amZfJ3

Many small fixes are a building block of the Kexi porting effort - the goal is joining the KOffice 2.2. Many of the fixes and refactoring is related to forms. Much more left and we're scheduling works on crazy features even up to Kexi 2.6 already.

As Maemo Summit 2009 starts in a few hours. While I am not there, for me one of the most interesting parts is the Handheld Glom: Easy database applications presentation. Glom is a desktop database developed by GNOME friends using gtkmm (C++). Originally bound directly to PostgreSQL, recently (early 2009) has gained SQLite file database support (default engine in Kexi since 2004). That was a must I guess if someone wants to cover needs of mobile devices; just imagine how easier it is going to be to share data files between various apps one day. While Glom offers somewhat simpler feature set than than Kexi, a gnomedb library db layer has been also developed in the meantime, having partially similar goals as the KexiDB library and (its new awfully delayed incarnation) Predicate in the Qt/KDE world.

While explaining the story behind his great ppttoxml tool, Jos also mentioned

Since about a year, Microsoft has, after significant political pressure, put documentation for their file formats on-line.

That's fine and solved some issues. But there are MS Access proprietary file formats (mdb, accdb) that remain to be secret. These are not planned to be replaced by XML formats (what would be overkill in databases). I guess there was no pressure to open the formats, what looks like an overlook in EU and the USA (correct me if there's another reason like patents). If you google for that, it is hard to find even a single mention of file format specifications in the above meaning, and even explanations from MS employees or backers show that they do not fully realize one thinf: MSA formats are not covered by the process of said "opening of the legacy formats".

A post on the KDE forum motivated me to write some info about what's new with Kexi 2.0. For sanity I groupped a set of quickies as an 2.0 Alpha 12 changelog. For uninformed, most applications within KOffice will meet the stable 2.0 release (already passed a promising RC1 stage), while Kexi and Kivio neds more time for development. The hope is to synchronize nicely at the 2.1 stage.

New year means some snow and cold noses here in Warsaw, and a new job to me, this time in the mobile industry, what has rather diversified my day, and that's good. Happy 2009 to you, to your friends and family.

But I am on the KDE board too, it's not going to change. What's recently time-consuming for me is refactoring of the Native Kexi Forms. The most serious and anticipated decision is dropping the (implemented in 2004..2005) idea of the forms component reusable at a rich API level for other applications. The idea has introduced too man layers after months of development, too many to have things maintainable, with just proof-of-concept KFormDesigner being the only app using the framework except Kexi.

I've been enjoying the time (bikes!), meetings (absolute record # of attendees) and technology (n810!) at Akademy since 9th August. And a young student from Poland, Michał Bartecki has been invited to come, what adds one to the number of the gfx individials around and made the KDE ping-pong team stronger. Kudos for the Team for such an unique event, for their time, sweat and tears

As the recent KDE Commit-Digest unveiled, it's visible that I've delivered Qt3-only incarnation of KexiDB to branches/kexi/kexidb-qt3/ in the KDE Subversion. KexiDB is a high-level database connectivity and creation library with database backend drivers for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Its development within the Kexi project started in 2003.

Kross, the scripting framework, is one of the pillars new with KDE4. While the project started already a while back in 2004 it enveloped over the time to a rather big codebase. During the KDE4-process one of the main-goals was to decrease the codebase what can be even more difficult then writting new code.