GNOME-DB

If you think, after reading Chapter 9, that writing applications in GTK+ is a formidable challenge—and that the idea of then having to learn the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) in order to get proper Oracle interaction is even worse—don’t lose hope. GNOME-DB was written partially to avoid just such aggravation. The development project was started back in 1998 by Michael Lausch, Rodrigo Moya, Stephan Heinze, Vivien Malerba, Nick Gorham, Chris Wiegand, and Alvaro del Castillo.

GNOME-DB provides a plug-and-play framework for GTK+ programmers to wrap database applications around. Essentially, it provides a framework for such applications: a base program and a set of libraries you can use to build your own applications. You can obtain backend plug-ins for various databases, including Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Interbase, and Solid; there is even an LDAP driver. GNOME-DB also comes with a number of sample database applications that you can use as examples of what you might want to create yourself. All in all, GNOME-DB is an impressive product.

The main web site for GNOME-DB is:

http://www.gnome.org/gnome-db/

Installing GNOME-DB

We suggest that you install GNOME-DB from source. There are RPMs available for GNOME-DB, but you’re probably going to run into missing libraries or version conflicts with this program, so you’re better off just giving the source a try.

Before you can install GNOME-DB, you’ll need to install the following modules:

  • libgda, which in turn ...

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