GNOME, Its State and Future

The objectives of the Gnumeric spreadsheet (see Figure 2) are to include all the features you can find on proprietary spreadsheets. Gnumeric has implemented most of the built-in functions available in Excel 2000, and by the time you read this, it should be complete.

Users can write their own functions in Python, Perl or Scheme, and access them through the Gnumeric engine. This enables people to adapt Gnumeric to their needs. Of course, if you like to use C, C++ or assembly, you can also hook up your functions to the spreadsheet.

We are copying many good ideas and usability features from popular spreadsheets and including them in Gnumeric.

Gnumeric also serves as a test-bed for the various GNOME technologies: CORBA, the Bonobo component and document model, and the GNOME printing architecture. Gnumeric was also one of the first applications that used libxml (the Gnumeric native file format is XML-based).

Gnumeric's rich set of import and export filters make it quite a valuable addition to your tool box, and if you are looking for an application to load your Excel spreadsheets, look no further: Gnumeric has the best Excel importing functionality available for GNU/Linux as tested by LinuxWorld.

Not only can you define your own functions for spreadsheets in the languages mentioned above, but you can actually script the entire application from any language that supports CORBA. Anything the user can do by using the spreadsheet user interface can be done through a CORBA communications channel, enabling you to use Gnumeric as a reusable engine for your applications.

Figure 3. AbiWord with GNOME Support

AbiWord (see Figure 3) is a project led by Source-Gear. It is a cross-platform word processor that can import your Word files. The word processor has gotten attention from many communities, since they can run the same word processor across UNIX, Win32, BeOS and MacOS. Their web site is at http://www.abisource.com/; you can download it from there. Abi contains a number of interesting features found in the proprietary word-processing equivalents.

The GIMP is the de facto standard for image editing, photo retouching, image authoring and composition. It is hard to list all the features, as it is one of the most successful free software projects. The GIMP is among the most actively developed applications, and Yosh Manish acts as its maintainer and coordinator.

Dia is a diagram application that can be used as a replacement for the popular proprietary application “Visio”. Dia supports various kinds of high-level objects for drawing: UML, Network, databases, circuit objects, flow charts and more. Dia is easy to extend with new object collections, as the various objects are defined using an XML-based file format.

It has quickly become the tool of choice for GNOME developers for generating diagrams and communicating graphical information with other developers. The Dia team consists of seven programmers and is commanded by Alexander Larsson. The Dia community is very active.

Figure 4. GNOME DB User Interface

GNOME DB (see Figure 4) is a framework for creating database applications. It provides both a common API with pluggable back ends to various database sources, and specialized widgets for handling various database tasks. The back ends, in the typical GNOME tradition, are based on CORBA. Michael Lausch and Rodrigo Moya are the main developers of this project.

GNOME-DB is composed of three separate, independent layers. The lowest level contains the database servers, which are CORBA servers that map the database-specific APIs to the GDA model. The middle layer is the GDA client library, which sits on top of the CORBA interface to allow an easier access from client applications. The middle layer also contains the GDA UI library, which provides a way of easily accessing the client library from GNOME applications. The top-level layer is composed of the applications making use of the middle-level layer, such as the Rolodex application and the SQL front end.