Oracle and Open Source

Gaby

Gaby stands for GTK Address Book of Yesterday. Names can be deceiving, however—Gaby isn’t a product of yesterday, and development work is actively going on today. Gaby is a straightforward application used to store generic records of data, for example, books, addresses, and notes. Gaby got its start in 1998, when Frederic Peters started to build a Python-based telephone number/address book application. (Subsequent problems with Python GTK+ bindings prompted a port to C.) Gaby has grown to be a generic data-handling application that’s somewhat like a specialized notepad.

New versions of Gaby are still coming out regularly. In the future, Frederic has plans to support various SQL database backends such as PostgreSQL and ODBC.

The main web site for Gaby is:

http://gaby.netpedia.net

Like Gnome Transcript, Gaby is not an Oracle-specific application—in fact, it’s not even really a client/server application that connects to MySQL or PostgreSQL, as is common with open source applications. So why describe it at all? Because Gaby is an application that shows off GTK+ well and, in the process, builds a simulated database for storing simple records such as a contact or book database. You provide simple files describing the fields, and Gaby provides you with an interface to create, edit, and delete records, as well as search through existing ones. As with Gnome Transcript, we thought looking at this application would help expand your own ideas for GTK+-based database applications.

Installing ...