Meyah and Liam had their birthdays a few days ago – Meyah on the 25th of December and Liam on the 29th.

Meyah is turning out to be just as friendly, energetic and curious as Liam. She’ll be walking soon. This is her second week in the creche, which will be good for her, but feels strange for us.

Liam wants to learn about everything and surprises me every few weeks with his sudden advances. Last week he learned how to play chess though a month before he would not have had the patience.

Raising two kids isn’t easy at times, but it’s the whole point of my life now and nothing has ever made me so happy.

I just implemented my first feature in Online Glom after taking over from Ben Konrath. Luckily I could cargo-cult his work, with some help from Eclipse’s code navigation and refactoring. I added a text box for an easy full text search of the current table, to filter the rows shown. For instance, you can filter the list of packages here.

I’m proud of myself, but I can’t help feeling that it needed far too many code changes, in far too many interconnected classes, just to add a text box in the browser and then use the resulting text to slightly change a method call on the server. I took the time to write a detailed ChangeLog/commit-message just to be sure that I understood what was happening.

This is apparently how things are in the land of Java. In its defence, there are reasons for the abstractions and separations. For instance, OnlineGlom code does the GWT thing of allowing for different View implementations for different clients, such as mobile or desktop, but it only has one type of Views for now. It also uses a Model/View/Presenter architecture, via its Activities, which makes it possible to test more code logic without getting the UI involved. And there’s the Places idea, which maps history tokens (parts of URLs) to Activities and vice-versa.

I wish there were some way to have the useful architecture without the repetitive code that gets in the way of the interesting stuff.

Glom‘s files can contain translations for the various table names, fields, relationships, choices, layout groups, reports, etc. This lets multiple people use the same database UI in different languages. Glom doesn’t require programming, so the .glom files don’t use gettext. But Glom can export the translations to .po files so translators can use their familiar tools. This week I added some command line utilities to do that more easily, plus some make rules to use them on the Glom examples.

I can now type “make examples_export_po” to export .po files and “make examples_import_po” to read the improved translations back into the Glom example files.

I put the .po files in Glom’s git repository, hoping that people will translate them, and maybe add more .po files. I wonder if these could even show up on Glom’s l10n.gnome.org page. Update: They do show up there now, thanks to Claude Paroz, and we already have some translations.

Ben Konrath recently finished up a first real milestone in Online Glom development, and I have deployed it, with the example Glom files, on an Amazon EC2 instance. Online Glom is still a read-only UI, so you can’t edit data in the database, but I think it’s already useful for some situations. Well, I do want to add the quick search feature soon to really finish off the read-only functionality. Report-generation would be good too.

The Film Production Manager example is a fairly good example of the complex systems that Glom can support, without SQL and without programming.

Here’s a screenshot of the same thing in the desktop UI.

I have also deployed my old Debian Repository Analyzer, full of real data, so you can get a feel for navigating around the related records. I spent lots of time updating that for the latest python-apt API and libgda (with python) APIs, and it’s now in a gitorious project. Many thanks to Michael Vogt for his help with python-apt.

Now that David King has packaged java-libglom (as libjava-libglom-java) for Ubuntu Oneiric in the Openismus PPA, it’s really easy to work with the gwt-glom code on that distro.

What’s Next

This proves that GWT was a sane choice, though development has not been as quick as I’d hoped . But I don’t think a generic framework can ever be developed as rapidly as most data-driven web sites that start as quick hacks. The difficulties have shown that I was right to focus on a restricted set of functionality at first. You can get a sense of how development has progressed by looking at the gwt-glom commit log, though there’s lots of work in java-libglom too.

I now plan to take the development further myself. That’s a nice way to get more deeply reacquainted with Java and web development. It’s easier to hack on the project at this stage, before it gets huge, rather than trying to do this from scratch. Ben Konrath has already made the large architectural decisions so that I don’t have to. I’m even enjoying Eclipse, which is a much more pleasant experience with Java than with C++. Well, using the Eclipse IDE is still like shopping in a flea market but with Java you will quickly find useful things.

I plan to do things roughly in this order:

• Add the Quick Find feature, for searching. Update: Done
• Add report generation.
• Add print layout printing.
• Maybe investigate how to make theming via CSS easier.
• Allow editing of data. This will be a big task.

At the same time, I will play with avoiding the need for java-libglom’s JNI binding to the libglom C++ library. I would need to reimplement Glom document parsing in Java, but that would be easy as it’s just XML. But I would also need some replacement for GdaSqlBuilder, to build SQL queries without manually concatenating and escaping text.

The Maliit developers and the Plasma Active developers, with some Mer developers too, discussed yesterday how they can work together. Reading the irc log, it seems to have been productive, with great input from all groups, and with some first development steps planned.

As always, I’m proud of our Maliit developers at Openismus. We believe that excellent developers must be communicators, or their work is for nothing. That log shows why.

The Openismus employees who worked on the N9′s Harmattan project received their free Nokia N9 phones from the company yesterday. It was expensive but its the right thing to do.

I released version 3.2.0 of the Programming with gtkmm book, with many corrections and updates from Kjell Ahlstedt and a small chapter about keyboard events from Pedro Ferreira.

As usual, it is available on the Kindle too.

It has taken over a year of hard work but Glom 1.20 is finally ready.

This is the most stable and most usable version of Glom yet, with a few new features, now using gtkmm 3. Here are some updated screenshots. The major changes:

• Simplified main window.
• Glom can now store and display PDFs. It can store any file format, though it can only display images and PDFs.
• Print Layout: Major overhaul with improved UI and new functionality.
• Related Records: Allow the developer to specify how many rows to show.
• Choice drop-downs can show more than 2 fields.
• Choice drop-down fields are aligned.
• Choice drop-downs can show related fields.
• List columns have sensible widths.

Around 20 bugs from bugzilla were fixed, plus several more.There are over 30 tests that prevent regressions in mostly non-UI code. I still wish I could get some kind of automated UI testing working.

We have packaged Glom 1.20 (and several dependencies) for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) in the Openismus PPA. We might do something similar for Fedora.

Unfortunately, it will probably take a year for Glom 1.20 to officially get into distros such as Ubuntu (bug) and Fedora (bug) officially, and then they won’t deliver bug fix updates. This is partly due to lack of the volunteer packagers’ time and partly due to unfriendly distro policies towards applications. My only hope now is something like Glick.

I recently pushed the Maliit team here at Openismus to tidy up the website, to make the current status clearer. Here is a summary:

Maliit is the only open-source input system that offers the features real products need, allowing on-screen keyboards for all the world’s languages. It is mature but it needs more work. This is the right project at the right time for various desktop projects to work together instead of having separate hacks that don’t please users.

Everybody loves the virtual keyboard on the N9, which Openismus worked on. That is the Meego Keyboard, which is built on the Maliit framework. It performs. It’s largely open-source, but it is fine-tuned for the N9′s MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. It has an unfortunate dependency on libmeegotouch, which few developers love.

The newer Maliit Keyboard does not depend on libmeegotouch, though it does depend on Qt and QML. With enough effort, the Maliit Keyboard could be as good as the MeeGo Keyboard.

The underlying Maliit framework API has been thoroughly tested and iterated by these keyboards and by other input methods, both open source and proprietary. It has had many contributors, has gained many regression tests, and is run by people who care deeply about quality.

Note that Maliit is not trying to be an on-screen keyboard for accessibility.

GNOME

We’d like GNOME to allow use of Maliit so people are not forced to use the current Caribou keyboard that only works with GTK+ applications and doesn’t offer features such as CJK or word prediction. We know that GNOME doesn’t want a hard Qt dependency. Of course that would be silly. We do want cross-platform compatibility. We also think that this is a large problem space that GNOME cannot tackle alone.

That would need gnome-shell (or its St toolkit) to support GtkIMContext as Maliit uses it. However, the gnome-shell developers currently feel that any on-screen keyboard (or input method UI, I think) must be part of gnome-shell’s own source code, and can’t be a separate process. Even if caribou could be made to work with non-GTK+ applications, a gnome-shell dependency is an even bigger block to cross-desktop adoption than Qt. So I really hope that this hard problem can be solved, though I do recognize that it’s hard.

The IBus implementation in gnome-shell seems to be hitting several similar issues (1, 2, 3), impacting CJK users even without a virtual keyboard. When they are fixed, maybe Maliit will work better. Note that, though Fedora has replaced SCIM with IBus, neither are really an issue for the on-screen keyboard, because IBus doesn’t let you show windows such as keyboards. However, the non-UI engines in the IBus plugins could (and probably should) be used in Maliit plugins.

I have some more notes about the current gnome-shell virtual keyboard here.

Unity (Ubuntu)

We’d like Ubuntu to use Maliit. We don’t know of any problems with that now, though I guess this depends on the GtkIMContext support in Unity’s nux toolkit library. We will do some tests on the WeTab soon.

Update: We published some Maliit packages for Ubuntu Oneiric in our PPA and we were pleased to find that nux seems to support GtkIMContext so you can, for instance, use the Maliit keyboard in the Dash’s search field. There are a few problems (1, 2, 3) but they seem fixable. There are also some generic GTK+ problems, but these are not blocked by anything fundamental in Unity.

Ubuntu currently ships Onboard, though that’s apparently just for accessibility.

KDE and Qt

We’d like KDE to use Maliit for their tablet efforts. The Maliit keyboards work today in Qt and KDE applications, though I don’t know if that means that they work in Plasma too. They have a Plasma keyboard (source code) already, and there seems to be interest in using Maliit instead of, or as a base for that. That would give it features that it apparently lacks, while also sharing the maintenance workload.

I recently made sure that Glom is not vulnerable to common SQL injections, which can risk destroying your data or providing unintended access to data. I’m mentioning it here so people can tell me if it’s not good enough. Be kind.

For the regular Glom desktop UI, it’s probably not a big issue, because only a small number of users have access anyway. But I believe in doing things properly and this certainly is an issue for Online Glom (more about that soon).

It turned out that things were mostly safe already, thanks to our use of GdaSqlBuilder instead of raw string concatenation. We still build a few special queries manually, to change database structure or permissions, and those would never be used by Online Glom, but I fixed (1, 2, 3, 4) them anyway. As a bonus, this avoids problems with special characters. Vivien Malerba, who is always incredibly helpful and responsive, fixed some related issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in libgda.

I added some SQL injection tests to make sure. I would welcome ideas (or patches) to test extra vulnerabilities. Like all of Glom’s tests that use an actual database, this tests libglom with both PostgreSQL and SQLite, though SQLite isn’t used by the regular Glom build.

Likewise, I made sure (1, 2) that we use g_shell_quote() when building shell commands, for instance to invoke (spawn) postgres or tar. Of course, I would rather not do that anyway. And I made sure that we properly escape values in our database connection strings.