[libreoffice-users] Re: Base questions

Le 01/08/2014 12:55, Wolfgang Keller a écrit :



> I never understood why anyone halfway sane in their minds would use an
> "embedded" database anyway or why the developers of StarOffice/LO/OO
> even considered it.

As I recall, at the time of the release of OpenOffice2, it had to be
like Access - but of course, as Sun was mainly running the show, that
meant that it had to be multi-OS, thus Java based and a fairly "simple",
"drop-in" piece of code with an appropriate licence. One would do well
to remember that at the time, the internal Sun Base development team
only comprised about 3 members of staff working full-time on the
project, thus resources were painfully limited. It turned out to be not
so simple after all, but that can be said about many things in software
development.

The issue of performance was raised even back then, and remains with us
today - embedded Java bridging (via UNO JNI) of an in-memory database -
loads of things to go potentially wrong at any given instance in the
lifecycle of the application, notwithstanding that upgrading to newer
versions of the db has always been fraught with complications, so a
maintenance nightmare for OOo/AOO/LO developers. It can be done though,
Fred Toussi (one of the lead developers on the hsqldb project) has, I
believe, provided patches for the integration of an update to the hsqldb
version code, but these have not been integrated due to the decision to
move to Firebird.

Database noobs wanted Access-like functionality and portability and
multi-OS operation - the fact that they don't really get that today with
LibreOffice Base is due more to lack of functional
implementation/integration witn the other parts of LibreOffice than to
the type of underlying db. Even MS Access has moved to a separated
db/frontend paradigm, as far as I understand.


Just to put things in perspective, there are, to my knowledge, currently
no full/part time paid-to-work developers within the LibreOffice project
that work on Base - everything done is voluntary, spare/free time
involvement, so it is hardly surprising that things with Base move a
little more slowly than modules such as Writer and Calc, in fact, it is
my undestanding that the main voluntary developer spends most of his
time in the project undoing the bugs/regressions caused by ongoing code
development elsewhere within the LibreOffice project.




Alex



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