Oracle and Open Source

Gnome Transcript

Now let’s turn our attention to a relatively new project called Gnome Transcript (in the world of GTK, “ancient” is about 16 months, “modern” about 16 nanoseconds). Since its first release in late 1999, Matias Mutchinick and Jose Miguel Ronquillo have been putting their energies into building a generic database application for managing tables. With Gnome Transcript, you can easily create, browse, and edit the contents of the tables in your database.

The main web site for Gnome Transcript is:

http://gtranscript.sourceforge.net

Gnome Transcript is a database-independent application that requires plug-ins for the various databases it supports. Currently, only MySQL and PostgreSQL have plug-ins available. Since there isn’t yet a plug-in for Oracle, you may wonder why we’ve included Gnome Transcript in this book. There are two reasons:

• A plug-in for Oracle could very well be written, and the exercise of doing so would teach the people involved a lot about OCI and/or Pro*C.

• The existing architecture provides an excellent model for building your own GTK+-based database applications, especially those involving the graphical display of tabulated information.

Installing Gnome Transcript

Installing Gnome Transcript itself is fairly straightforward, as long as you use the relevant RPM package. Before you install Gnome Transcript, you will have to obtain the following:

• The libgtrans_ifase module, a separate package that provides access to the Gnome Transcript plug-in system. ...