Chapter 4. Building Oracle Applications with Perl/Tk and Tcl/Tk
The previous chapter introduced the use of the most popular open source scripting languages—Tcl, Perl, and Python, along with their GUI toolkits—and the Oracle interfaces built upon them. In this chapter, we’ll take a detailed look at two particular Oracle applications, one from the Perl camp and the other from the Tcl camp:
- Orac
A Perl/Tk GUI tool designed mainly for database and system administrators; it performs database management and performance tuning and also makes use of the Perlplus Netscape plug-in.
- Oddis
A Tcl/Tk GUI tool conceptually similar to Orac and designed for both DBAs and developers; it performs database management and performance tuning, with a special focus on SQL tuning.
As yet, no major Python Tkinter Oracle application making use of DCOracle is generally available. We’re hoping one of our faithful readers will remedy this situation in the near future.
In addition to describing what Orac and Oddis do (and briefly mentioning a few related tools, such as dbMan), we’ll also spend some time looking at the implementations of these two Oracle applications. We’re hoping that looking at these implementations might give you some good ideas for how to approach building your own applications. Although these relatively large applications were developed entirely independently from each other, it’s interesting to see how their functionality overlaps.
In the second part of this chapter, we’ve also provided a small ...