Linux database becomes a browser

Postman's sort.

Not that it's that relevant to the story, but you could look up the "Postman's Sort" which is O(cn).

hmm..

Think I'll give this browser, developed by database experts, a miss. Went to their homepage and got the message:

"Database Error

The current username, password or host was not accepted when the connection to the database was attempted to be established!"

FileMaker

This is newsworthy?!?!? FileMaker Pro has been "mashing-up" dynamic Web pages as a desktop database for sometime now - and you can run it on platforms that people actually use instead of just writing about!

Pedants 'r' us

So Nate really ought to have said that you can sort ten million records in 11 minutes 40 seconds, rather than 10 minutes - the man should be shot at dawn!

Testing...

If your browser isn't setup to accept cookies there homepage has a hissy fit, methinks they need to do a bit more testing and design it with fewer assumptions??

Jason

oh you nay sayers !!

This is fantastic for intranets .... its easy to publish html data for regular users and allow "power users " to create thier own reports.

Yes there's teething trouble, but the IDEA is a great one .....

I hope their database indexing is quicker than their fileserving...

Nothing says "Web 2.0" more convincingly than a download running at 6k/second, eh?

Filemaker

A propos Filemaker, a new version was recently released, which I was hoping to see reviewed sometime, as I was thinking of using it to post collected gems onto the internet.

Instead, we see a lot of science news stories - great for putting IT in its proper corner, but less central to your first calling.

$299 for windows/linux BINARY versions, no source provided.

WTF, anyone at the reg decided to provide free advertising for these guys ???

if it were open source i'd say the article looks ok, but these guys only deliver BINARIES ONLY, and you're expected to pay $250 for either the windows or the linux version, $300 if you also want updates provided during the first year of use, and $50 per year for each license after that.

In addition they have a huge license violation over there: since it's built around the gecko engine which is covered under the mozilla-tri-license (mozilla + gpl + lgpl).

Since they don't provide ANY source code at all on the download page, not even for the gecko engine they 'incorporated' into the binaries, i think that some feathers are about to be ruffled over at the big fire bird HQ.

Couldn't disagree with them more re FF-extension

Not debating that it would be difficult (it almost certainly would), but I don't think the features of this browser are such that I would use them every day. I'd much rather have a browser that could do this kind of thing when I call upon it, rather than specifically for it.

It's quite a nice idea tho'. But I think I'll have to file it under "neat" rather than "useful" in terms of my daily trawl through the web.

is this a mozilla license violation or am i wrong ??

still me: even though it's built around the mozilla gecko open source engine, they don't provide any source code, not even for the gecko engine they 'incorporated'. Also, their license agreement doesn't mention mozilla or gecko at all, instead they claim it's all theirs:

http://www.kirix.com/legal/beta-eula.html

IMPORTANT: THE Strata� BETA SOFTWARE IS A PROPRIETARY PRODUCT AND IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND OTHER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWS. IT IS LICENSED (NOT SOLD) FOR USE SUBJECT TO THE CONDITION THAT LICENSEE AGREES TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. THE LICENSED SOFTWARE IS BETA, TIME-LIMITED, SOFTWARE MEANT FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY. THIS SOFTWARE SHOULD NOT BE USED IN A COMMERCIAL OPERATING ENVIRONMENT OR WITH IMPORTANT DATA. BEFORE INSTALLING THE Strata� BETA SOFTWARE, LICENSEE SHOULD BACK UP ALL OF ITS DATA AND REGULARLY BACK UP DATA WHILE USING THE Strata� BETA SOFTWARE.

[snip]

2. OWNERSHIP. Licensee acknowledges and agrees that Kirix owns (or is licensee of) and retains through the term hereof all right, title and interest in and to the Software, including without limitation any and all copyrights, patents, trade secrets, trademarks and other intellectual and proprietary property rights therein. Licensee agrees not to use Kirix�s trademarks or other business names for any purpose or to take any actions which are harmful to or inconsistent with Kirix�s rights in its trademarks, service marks and trade names. Licensee will not earn or acquire any rights or licenses under any copyrights, patents, trade secrets, trademarks or other intellectual or proprietary property rights on account of this Agreement, Licensee�s use of the Software or any suggestions made by Licensee with respect to the Software.

==================================

Cue the lawyers in 3....2.....1.....

Very sorry about the slow site...

Hello all,

Our servers didn't take to the jump in traffic this morning very well. I suppose this gives the phrase "slowly rolling out a beta" a new meaning. Ouch.

We're working on getting a mirror up for the download now. The screencast, albeit at a pretty low resolution, can also be seen at YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiNuW3RQ37A

As we're working on getting things sorted out, I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has here in the meantime.

Thank you for your patience, it is appreciated,

Ken Kaczmarek

Kirix

MPL

Gecko/xulrunner is licensed under the MPL. They don't need to distribute source, if the original mozilla.org binaries are redistributed. See the Mozilla Public License FAQ, first answer.

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/mpl-faq.html

What a waste

I spent half the morning downloading it, only to find out it was all pre-compiled, no source included.

There's *no way in hell* that I'll *ever* run a binary that was compiled by anyone other than me or the experts at my favourite Linux distribution. I value the integrity of my computer more than that.

follow up

OK, we've added another server into the mix, so things should be working smoother now. Sorry about the website troubles. A few responses to the comments above:

@ David and @Chris

Yes, Nate should have couched his estimate with "around". :)

@ G2 re: licensing:

Hi G2, we actually distribute an unmodified binary of the gecko engine under the MPL. You can get the source of this exact same unmodified binary at the Mozilla site. In your posting of part of the EULA, "Kirix owns (or is licensee of)" - the key bit there regarding gecko is "licensee of". It took a bit of work to use the unmodified binary, and we'll be offering that "kit" as an open source library for wxWidgets in the next week or two so others can use it too.

@ Colin re: FF extension:

Unfortunately, on the website, we've only begun to unwrap the functionality of Strata and it is a bit heavy on the "open up and manipulate data files from the web" to the exclusion of some of the more advanced stuff you can do with web APIs, local data files and external DBs (like Oracle or MySQL), not to mention handling lots of data (which is often not necessary with a small HTML table). If it were just about opening up web tables, I would agree that an extension would probably be just fine.

We're in the process of finalizing our API for Strata and should have this documentation available along with examples hopefully later this week. So if you'd like to check back, it's possible you'll see a bit more value in a standalone app.

re:follow up

i stand corrected then, if it's a direct binary of gecko

proprietary software => dll hell ?

$ sudo ./setup

./setup: /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by ./setup)

dll hell

anon,

Could you post that issue in our support forums (kirix.com/forums)... one of our linux guys will help you out.

Thanks,

ken

Not FreeSoftware not good enough

While legal, taking source code from current open source projects and locking it up won't win any hearts or minds in the open or free software worlds. KS may be able to sell this but I'd bet anything that if it's really useful there'll be a gpl version by next year.

re: Not FreeSoftware not good enough

Martin,

No question that when something is useful, the open source movement will tend to recreate it (and, in cases like Firefox, blow away commercial products). If that does happen, they'll be free to use some of the open source stuff we will be offering in our upcoming "Kirix Labs" section of our website.

I just wanted to quickly comment on the idea of "locking it up" just to make sure that everyone knows we're not doing anything subversive to the open source movement, which we strongly support and participate in.

Gecko is used by lots of people and companies, both open and closed source (http://www.mozilla.org/university/HOF.html) and Mozilla has been generous enough to offer it as MPL along with LGPL and GPL, so that commercial interests can use it and, hopefully, add resources to help develop it further. This is also the case with wxWidgets, which we use as well as contribute significantly to. The vast bulk of Strata is the data engine, connectivity, scripting, etc. that we wrote as a company... Gecko only provides the web rendering portion, so there is no "locking up" going on, other than that we've chosen, at this point, to follow a closed source model for this product.

We were very thankful to be able to use Gecko, which meant we could create a product for Linux, which many of us use internally. Otherwise, we would probably have had to use IE and make it Windows only (and get all those lovely bugs and security issues to boot. :)

I mentioned our Labs section -- we've got a bunch of open source projects that we are queuing up for release in the coming weeks and months that we'll be posting there. Even if you're not interested in Strata, we hope you might find some cool free stuff there to use.

Cheers,

ken

Great idea

I think this is a great idea. Looked at the screencast and am quite impressed. I particularly like the way the data is imported off a HTML table. I am wondering - but do you guys have a way of running this in a daemon / automated mode such that data can be imported off a website perioidically?

Also, yes, there are a lot of ways this can be used in an intranet scenario.

Congratulations to the team behind this.

re: Great idea

Hi Prem, as far as daemon/automated mode, at this point, the way you would do this is to write a script to create the process you want and then place that in our job scheduler to run on a regular basis. If you want to try it out and need help, just shoot us a question in our help forums. Thanks.

@Prem Kurian Philip

Please, save your congratulations for the (eventual) developers of a GPL workalike.

lol

>> "Please, save your congratulations for the (eventual) unorigonal rip off merchants of a GPL workalike" Fix'd

Guys come up with a novel idea and all the opensource folks go "o no precompiled dll's waahhh - someone should rip off this idea for us waah waah"

Open Source?

I don't see where the complaint is, that this program isn't open source. I didn't see any claims that it was - it's proprietary. What's the problem? If you don't want to use proprietary software, then by all means, feel free to not download it.

I found that the installation was unfriendly and confusing. The installation program got confused by some of my directory names, which have spaces in them. When that happened, it continued on its merry way, and informed me that it had installed properly. There needs to be some error checking.

I have since removed the program from my computer. I'll wait for - or write (don't hold your breath) - an open source version.

Open Source?

As an addendum to my previous comment, I found their Website wasn't particularly helpful in directing me to where I needed to go in order to offer feedback. Perhaps I missed something, but I've given them all the time they're going to get from me.

Perhaps some other day...

re: Open Source?

Sorry about the installation issues, we'll add this issue to our bug list (there are definitely some Linux install issues that have been brought up in our forums that still need to be worked out). As far as feedback, maybe we should move the "Contact Us" from the footer to the header to make this easier to find. There are also links in the Community section (feedback, forums) and the Help section (Contact Us, forums) to provide feedback, but they are sort of buried.

Thanks for the time you have given, it is appreciated. If you've got the time or interest, we'll be releasing new beta iterations throughout the beta period, so maybe one further down the road would be more to your liking.

All the best,

ken