While I was on holiday, a couple of Glom reviews appeared:
- Xaprb’s A review of the Glom graphical database front-end
- Ryan Paul’s Cool App Of The Week on Ars Technica
Both reviews are generous and kind. They understand what I’m trying to offer with Glom while forgiving it for not yet being perfect. I agree with Xaprb’s review that there are still a few too many bugs in the 1.0 version so I think it’s still not the right time to work on big new features.
I’ve listed the Glom reviews on the glom.org site.
One thing I’ve long thought would make Glom cooler — and I’m only now getting around to mentioning it, sorry — is the possibility of an SQLite backend. That would, I think, make it much more accessible to novices and non-techies than a PostgreSQL backend, because it would give them a single file that they could point to with all their data in it. No more “Where’s my data?” “Well, see, it’s being kept by PostgreSQL, and it’s all in this directory over here, but it’s split between all these files with weird names.” Instead, they’d have a single file, “mydata.db” or whatever, that they could copy to a USB stick, or email to someone else, or …
One of the things I get asked about quite a lot when I recommend Linux to people is “Can I run Word/Excel/Access on it?” For the first two, I point them to OpenOffice — but for all those people with Access DB’s, I can’t really recommend something that “works the same” from a user-experience point of view. I think Glom has the potential to be a decent replacement for Access (from a user-experience point of view), but I think it would do a much better job if it could use an all-your-data-in-one-file backend such as SQLite.
I hope this helps.
Robin, I’m resisting a SQLLite option because it doesn’t seem to support multiple users, and I’m fairly sure that a) a large number of people will quickly want to share their Glom systems with multiple users simulteneously, and b) those people will not want, at that time, to think about switching from sqllite to postgres just to allow that.
So I’m still more interested in embedding postgres and using that by default (so the first person who opens a .glom file is the person/PC who serves that file), with use of a separate postgres server being the option. Hopefully we can even get an embedded postgres to use just one file – but at least everything can be in one directory.
Dear Murray,
I am very happy seeing your progress on Glom, but, as Robin wrote, I’d also like to have sqlite3 support.
My father-in-law needs simple database to track his invoices (not many), so he only needs to enter some data and get invoice exported (eg. pdf) for sending via email and/or printing.
So, there are several complicated-to-setup apps which does complete payroll system, complex invoicing, accounting etc., but what is missing is simple Kexi-like apps.
Glom looks nice, but it is too complicated for not so savvy users.
Sincerely,
Gour
Again, I agree that the server part of the setup should be simpler and automatic. (see the second paragraph of my reply above). But I disagree that sqllite would be an appropriate solution (see the first paragraph of my reply above).
i would like to use Pg preciesly bec. it’s a multiuser prog. i’m no programmer & am looking for an Access-like front-end so i can recommend to my bosses that they adopt Pg instead of Access and move our db to Pg, but i need something to work with. we use a simple setup too, one that only involves two tables on a 1 to many relationship and lots of forms and reports based on queries which bring up the info. We were able to do it all ourselves and work in a government office where we would like to save the taxpayer some $$ by doing it ourselves instead of contracting the work out, which is what our bosses are looking to do.
i have moved to Freespire and will be able to recommend this to the chiefs because it has OpenOffice, but we don’t even use that very much since almost all of our work is and can be done through the db. However Freespire only has the 0.8 edition of Glom and when i tried to download and install the 1.03 edition it didn’t want to install properly. i don’t know if it was my lack of knowing how to do this or a problem with the program.
Murray suggested that i ask the people at Freespire to upgrade the version of Glom that they offer to at least 1.0 but Freespire has its own timeline on things so we’re stuck. There are 14 of us in the office at this point and if we can show our IT dept. how easy it is to install and run Freespire we may be able to eventually move over the whole County Office of Education and, dreaming, eventually the whole county school system.
Anyway, i hope you can get pg embedded in Glom. It would make it even easier for ordinary joes like us to use pg.
Have a great evening! :D
> i have moved to Freespire and will be able to recommend this to the chiefs because it has OpenOffice,
This doesn’t make sense to me. All the distros have OpenOffice. I recommend Ubuntu because they are both stable and up-to-date and they have a large community of people who can keep it that way.
Ubuntu also target educators and their IT staff with Edubuntu.
> when i tried to download and install the 1.03 edition it didn’t want to install properly
Installing from source will always be difficult. It’s not something a regular user should ever need to do.