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KDE Development News

Wed 14 Jul 1999 - Tue 20 Jul 1999

ODBC in KDE. The big announcement this week was from Lars Doelle concerning the ongoing integration of ODBC support into KDE. In particular, iODBC, unixODBC (announcement clarifications from Nick Gorham) , and libodbc++ are now part of kdesupport. Since iODBC and unixODBC provide the same functionality, one of these may have to be dropped prior to the release of KDE 2.0.

Short term goals for ODBC in KDE include configuration tools, a database browser/editor/query tool and possibly database support in KOffice. Long term goals include integration between the ODBC API and the world of distributed objects.

Peter Harvey has already added graphical configuration support for unixODBC, including a couple of generic driver config libs, to the KDE Control Center.

developer.kde.org. Richard Moore has checked in a new version of developer.kde.org. Now that the developer site is in CVS, it is hoped that more people will get involved and help maintain and improve the site. I'm pleased to announce that the KDE Development News reports will soon be hosted at this new site.

On a related note, Martin Konold announced that the infrastructure for devel-home.kde.org is finally in place. To recap, devel-home.kde.org provides free webhosting for KDE projects that need it, minus all the annoying advertising.

KDE Standard Website? Boris Povazay is interested in maintaining a well-designed website template for KDE hackers who are webdesign-impaired (or don't care enough). He's wondering whether there are any developers out there interested in using such a thing. See the example site.

Krumple. Yannai A. Gonczarowski announced version 0.1 of the KDE Installation SyStem Installer Generator. Krumple automatically generates a self-installing multi-platform executable package complete with GUI from the gzipped tar of the source package. It currently uses the KISS package format across all systems but frontends for RPM/DEB/PKG/etc that emulate KISS syntax may be added.

Empath. Rik Hemsley has been hard at work as usual. His pet project is currently Empath, described by a fan as a great, if not better, Outlook clone (screenshot). In particular, Rik announced that he has finished documenting libempath, a general mail kernel. Libempath is basically a backend that handles all mail transactions, allowing one to implement an arbitrary frontend/UI. Rik also announced that he has been working on a generic addressbook format.

Featured Application: KPriMa. Did you know that there was a KDE GUI to the PS utilities? A utility that helps you manage printing queues, change paper size and even save the rain forest by printing several pages on one sheet? It's called KPriMa and is currently at version 0.1.

KDE Quickies. Jo Dillon (of Harmony fame) has written a KControl applet that allows the user to set the mouse cursor for the root window. Torben Weis announced that KOM/OpenParts/KOffice development has switched to MiniSTL in order to save memory and decrease compilation time.

Want to help KDE? Matthias Elter has updated the jobs page.

An archive for these KDE development reports is available.