DUI -- Data Under the Interface

(aka DWI -- Data With Interaction)

This is a rather basic (simplistic, even) environment for quickly creating data-driven applications, that is, graphical applications that manipulate and show info from a database. This environment differs from others in that it is focused on native GTK/Gnome support through the Glade GUI designer, and thus allows you to build user interfaces as elegant as you can make them in Glade.

At this point, this system is not terribly feature-rich, but it should be adequate for creating basic form-editing and reporting applications. Multiple SQL databases are supported through an ODBC driver. It should not be hard to add a native Postgres driver, or even a non-SQL database driver.

The actual connection between the database fields and the glade widgets is described in an XML-based "DWI" file. Currently, the only way to create DWI files is by hand. In the future, we hope to have an extension to Glade, or possibly an extension to a database-browsing tool that will allow you to graphically make such connections.

Note that the design of the XML format is sufficiently generic that it is not directly tied to Glade. It is envisioned that it could be used to create data-driven web pages. That is, Glade is currently the only GUI driver, but other drivers for other GUI's should be possible.

Screenshots

These screenshots show a very basic app. The screenshots are not of DWI itself, but of a very simple application created with it. Actually, what is shown was created by Glade; you'll have to take my word that there's a database behind this. Of course, you can get much, much depending on your glade skills, you can get much much fancier than this.

Tutuorial

To create a DWI application, you need to know SQL, and you need to be able to write XML files, such as this one. You do not need to program in C or any other language. The dwi-run interpreter will run the entire application based on the DWI file.

Download

Downloads are here. The current version is 0.1. It works; we could call it 1.0, but more is planned.

Notes:


March 2002 Linas Vepstas