[Gambas-user] Question about the real scope of Gambas, and other on compatibility

[Benoit Minisini]

On samedi 1 décembre 2007, Rob wrote:
> On Saturday 01 December 2007 07:56, Tomas Eroles i Forner wrote:
> > By myself I would like to know if is possible (or will be possible
> > anytime) to use Gambas for manage OpenOffice documents, that is, if
> > could be possible to create Writer, Calc, Draw or Impress documents
> > and fill or read them.
>
> The ZIP file component I'm currently writing is meant to be a first
> step towards generating ODF documents (which are XML files stored in
> JAR files, which in turn are ZIP files), though it'll be a long time
> before an ODF component I write will be spec-complete.  (The Perl one
> I use is far, far from spec-complete, and not too user-friendly, and
> I just want to do better than that. ;) )
>
> My ZIP component can currently open a ZIP file and list its contents.
> I'll post a first version once it can read a file from the ZIP file
> into a variable.  That should be enough to allow reading ODF files,
> though I'll probably keep working on gb.zip (or gb.archive.zip or
> gb.compress.zip, whatever Benoit wants me to name it) until it can
> write files as well before tackling ODF.
>
> And my personal preference for writing an ERP application at this
> point would be web-based with some additional background processes.
> While Gambas is certainly capable of that, I personally would use
> perl or php.  Some would say you should use j2ee because it
> has "Enterprise" in its name.  In my opinion, those people need to
> loosen up their neckties a little.
>
> Rob
>

gb.compress works the same way as gb.db. It can compress and uncompress 
specific file formats provided that you write the gb.compress.XXX driver for 
that (gb.compress.zip in that case). Look in the source code of 
gb.compress.zlib to see how to write gb.compress.zip.

Anyway, I use directly the zip & unzip utilities via EXEC to uncompress and 
compress the OpenOffice files, so a specific component is not really needed 
for that.

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini