Kexi

From Encoresoup - The Ultimate Guide to Free/Open Source Software

Kexi is an integrated data management application, designed to fill the gap between spreadsheets and database solutions requiring more sophisticated development. Kexi can be used for designing and implementing databases, data inserting and processing, and performing queries.

The impetus for developing Kexi came from a noticeable lack of applications having the features of Microsoft Access, FoxPro, Oracle Forms or FileMaker while at the same time being powerful, inexpensive, open-standards-driven and sufficiently portable.

Kexi is a component of KOffice, with large contributions coming since early 2003 from OpenOffice Polska^[1][2] (currently OpenOffice Software). It works under Linux/Unix, Mac OS X (using Fink), Solaris, and the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Although Kexi is an open source application, currently OpenOffice Software is charging for the full featured Windows version, due to the cost of commercial tools (Qt and compiler) needed to port the software to Windows.^[3] Thanks to the recent open-sourcing of the Qt library, a free alpha version for Windows is available through the KDE on Windows program.^[4]

[edit] Features

Kexi can connect to different database servers such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

It can also work without a server, by utilizing the built-in SQLite database engine. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to data, and are stored within the database. Simple reports can be printed or previewed. Scripting using Python and Ruby is available as well as application macros, similar to those in Microsoft Access (in experimental stage). All database objects - tables, queries, forms, etc. - are stored in a single database file, making it easy to share data and design.

If SQLite is used, the resulting database file can be manipulated using many other SQLite tools, including the Tcl programming language.

[edit] See also

• Comparison of office suites

[edit] External links

• Kexi features
• Kexi Project web sites
  • http://kexi-project.org (home page with information for advanced users and developers)
  • http://koffice.org/kexi (general information for users)
• Commercial Kexi releases by OpenOffice Software

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