Re: [Sqliteman-devel] Sqliteman future

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hi Alessio,

thanks for you interest.

The situation around Sqliteman is not good. There is no progress in it for months. The 1.2.x versions are used still, but the development 1.3.x never touched its testing releases although it contains many improvements.
The main reason is that I don't have free time to work on this software and mainly - I don't need it to my regular work too as there is no sqlite db around me now.

There were some movements how to start its development again but with no (or minor) success.

Maybe you will be the missing startup element? Who knows...

responses to your questions follows:

On Jan 1, 2011 (Saturday), at 5:03 PM, Alessio Civitillo wrote:
> I have been using Sqliteman for quite a while and it is indeed the best Sqlite manager out there. Lately, I have been thinking of implementing Sqliteman with an "analytic" part. I have been using Sqlite to store data for my analysis and I found it really good. My main issue is that I use python and R coding to make my analysis and I have scripts all around. My thought is: what if Sqliteman could be implemented with a pluggable analytic part? So, maybe with the possibility to create ad hoc analysis plug ins with python.

There is no support for 3rd party plugins.
There is no scripting support too.
There is support for sqlite3 extensions in 1.3.x.

There are some solution how to enable scripting in Qt4 app - manual bindings, KROSS (http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Kross/Introduction), and more. But I had never any reason to do it.

As a dummy solution we can add a quick workaround with some user-defined menu entries which can run your scripts with some additional arguments like:
callExternalScript("python foo.py /path/to/databasefile.db providedusername pass...");
and handle its results

> This is something that could be really useful for me and I would do the programming myself. However, I only know python programming and have some basics of qt. I would like to know if someone could be interested in helping me. I can also do the programming myself, but I need an introduction to Sqliteman source code and eventually some tips to learn fast C++. 

Coding in Qt4 is quite easy. It handles most of memory management for you itself like Python does. I can say there is only syntax different between PyQt and pure Qt4 if you will make only simple things like forms, image loadings, or R interpret calling. Please take it as a "motivation and introduction" only ;)

ad Sqliteman code internals: most of the code is (I hope) self explanatory - there are no low-level techniques used. Most code files contain "extended functionality" like various dialogs (new db objects, populator, exports, imports, ...) - it's usually small file with little "blackboxed" functionality.

most of code should be documented, 1.2.x docs are available online:
http://docs.sqliteman.com/devel-doc/annotated.html

main app is located in litemanwindow.* which connects basic GUI together.

Direct data manipulation (without sql) is done in dataviewer.* and its sub-components.

database.* files contains functions to query or manipulate raw SQL

Personally I'm not happy with current architecture of DB transaction handling as it mixes raw SQL access (BEGIN; foo; COMMIT;) with Qt4 QtSql module transactions (in dataviewer). I had plans to write own driver to be used in the app as only db access method one day but there is no motivation for now on my side.
And of course - all DB access is done in main app thread so the app can looks "frozen" in some circumstances.

Anyway, I think it's enough for quickstart. Feel free to ask.

cheers,
petr

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