Re: The future of pgAdminII .....

From: "Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk>
To: "John McCawley" <jmccawley(at)worleyco(dot)com>, <pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: The future of pgAdminII .....
Date: 2002-06-28 18:29:52
Message-ID: D85C66DA59BA044EB96AB9683819CF61015125@dogbert.vale-housing.co.uk
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: John McCawley [mailto:jmccawley(at)worleyco(dot)com]
> Sent: 28 June 2002 20:13
> To: pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] The future of pgAdminII .....
>
>
> >
> >
> >Have you considered Fox: http://www.fox-toolkit.org
> >I know you said you have not gotten you head around C++
> >but there is a binding to ruby http://fxruby.sf.net
> >
> Well, my .02 is this...
>
> It would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to implement the
> Access migration functionality of PGAdminII off of the
> Windows platform.
> I am not too well versed in other areas of the tool, but I would
> venture a guess that a lot of the functionality is highly tied to ADO
> and other interfaces that don't necessarily have a
> competitive workalike
> outside of the ADO/Jet/VB/etc world.

This is very true. I am finding however, that I don't have the time (or
interest) to spend on the peripheral tools and plugins for pgAdmin (for
example, the Migration Wizard is a ported version of the code in the
GPL'd pgAdmin I). When I rewrite pgAdmin in whatever language it will
be:

1) Cross platform
2) Able to manage and design *all* PostgreSQL objects
3) Able to connect to multiple servers simultaneously
4) Bloody good :-)

I will not be spending time writing plugins that people won't use. For
example, how many people use the Msysconf wizard, or the publishing
wizard?

Probably the most useful of these tools is the Migration Wizard (well,
at least until your app is ported) and the import wizard, which are both
*very* high maintenance bits of code which due to their very nature
cause more support issues than anything else.

They are also both tools for which there are alternatives. Access can
copy tables using the upsizing wizard, or by saving them to an ODBC
datasource, SQL Server has it's Data Transform Services (Data Pump).
Other DBMS's can easily export their schemas and data in relatively
standard formats. Flat ASCII datafiles as handled by the Import Wizard
can be modified using Perl, Excel or Gnumeric and saved in formats
suitable for psql's COPY command.

Hopefully you see where I'm coming from...

> but my experiences with GTK, QT, WxWindows, et. al. have
> taught me that they are rarely the panacea they claim to be.

For a while I was convinced that C# was the way forward for pgAdmin, and
to that end I am very involved in the Npgsql project to build a .Net
data provider for PostgreSQL. I am less convinced now as it seems that
the Windows.Forms classes will not exist in Mono for some time. This is
why I then started looking at other technologies. From much research,
wxWindows seems to be the best choice (I'm not saying it will be easy
mind) with C++. There is a fair amount of documentation detailing the
gotchas and considerations when writing cross platform code.

> If a
> person is having trouble with C++ in the first place, the
> world of cross
> platform C++ toolkits is a tough thing indeed.

:-) I will get my head around C++ - I just haven't given it any serious
time yet.

Regards, Dave.

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