Intro or what are Kexi objects?

Kexi objects are the top-level entities of type Table, Query, Form, Report, Script or Macro. They are compared to perhaps separate document types except of course they are not physical files (in Kexi nothing touches physical files except the database that handles the actual storage but this is rather an implementation detail).

The latter two objects aren't in official use: Script is experimental and subject to rework; Macros (MS Access style, see old dev docs) are only planned.

If you're new RAD world, for info on what these types of objects are, google for MS Access objects. Many of its concepts and naming make sense with the exception of Modules -- Kexi tends to use Scripts term instead.

If you're seeing crashes lately, and they look like:

(gdb) bt
#0 0x00007ffff6790913 in QString::~QString() () from /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib/libQt5Core.so.5
#1 0x00007ffff680fd89 in QHashData::free_helper(void (*)(QHashData::Node*)) () from /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib/libQt5Core.so.5
#2 0x00007ffff6828e14 in (anonymous namespace)::Q_QGS_globalEngineCache::innerFunction()::Holder::~Holder() ()
from /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib/libQt5Core.so.5


Today I have the pleasure to announce that Marble is the first popular virtual globe that ships and visualizes the Behaim Globe. The Behaim Globe is the oldest surviving terrestrial globe on earth. It was created between 1492 and 1493 - yes at the same time when Christopher Columbus made his first voyage towards the west and "discovered" America.

This week database apps builder Kexi that competes with MS Access and Filemaker has been released with cool new features.

Version 2.9.8 finally fixes world's issues with SQL! 22 typical scalar functions now work portably across SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL. No other general purpose software I know does this.

Here's the list and it will be growing:

Supplemental to what we reported previously about the work in Randa [1, 2] there was a session on the future of Kontact, KDE’s personal information manager (PIM). Over the years this tool has evolved into a monster making both development as well as usage sometimes tricky. It’s time to cut hydra’s arms.

One of the goals I've had with Konsole was to combine all the configure dialogs: 1) Configure Konsole; 2) Manage Profiles; 3) Edit Profile. Currently, in the branch config_dialog, the Manage Profiles is now combined with the main Configure dialog. The only downside is that the Konsole part can't open the Manage Profiles dialog. If and when the Edit Profile gets combined, I'll have to make sure the parts can open those dialogs.

KSnapshot is getting an overhaul.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. I started to work on the KF5 port of KSnapshot (EDIT: no, contrary to what Phoronix claims this port is not my work; I simply wanted to fix anything that needed fixing) sometime in early March this year, before I realised that the codebase, while perfectly in order for being a X11-only screenshot taker for KDE (yes, KSnapshot actually has a complete and fairly decent KF5 port in its frameworks branch on KDE Git), was in need of a major overhaul if we were going to get proper Wayland support in.

[Skip if you're not a git user]

You will often want to have more than one build environment in parallel, for example if you want to work on stable and various feature branches. Recommended way so far was to use a git-new-workdir script. This solution saves space (e.g. ~300MiB for a calligra branch instead of ~1200MiB) and time.

I am happy to say that Pre-Alpha edition of ‪Kexi‬ 3.0 runs nicely already after like 3 weeks of porting! Especially its tabular view work out of the box for me after fixing the last compilation error with zero fixes needed in the functionality.

Porting for the porting itself would not be an interesting goal. As you see on the picture Kexi 3.0 uses KDE Frameworks 5. With Qt 5.4 it's More compact, faster, closer to mobile devices. And a 1st class citizen called Windows version has to come to reach the wide audience.

Many pre-university students have participated in Google Code-In (2014) again and for many of them it has been the first opportunity to make contributions to Free Software and Open Source projects. In opposite to Google Summer of Code the GCI program is organized as a worldwide contest where students at the age of 13-17 years take the challenge to complete as many software development tasks from their mentor organizations as possible.