[Oberon] Re. Blackbox open source available

[Dan Parnete]

John Drake wrote:

>Here's the reason.  Recently I've been doing a 
>lot of work with V4 due to it's ODBC support.
>  
>
John,

    There is ODBC support even for ETH Oberon. I'm using it with a 
Sybase SQL Anywhere database and it works fine.
    Turning back to BlackBox, I don't really like it's old Windows 
style. But the application framework (or component builder as they call 
it) is very strong. I suppose ETH team will never invest time in that 
direction. Looking back to the Gadgets, is evident that author didn't 
intend it for data presentation interface. The lack of a combobox or of 
any kind of dropdown listbox, or the mess of a grid, or of the TextField 
right justify, witch make numbers difficult to read in column fashion, 
are clear signs.
    I like BlueBottle look&feel. I like BlueBottle at all. Great ideas, 
great job, compliments to all of them. But I can't use it. I'm not a 
system developer, unfortunately, and writing software is not just a 
hobby for me, unfortunately. So if we want a RAD, or Component Builder, 
or Application Framework, or whatever you want to call it, we have to 
build it out of the ETH team. An we must hope BlueBottle will be ported 
on Linux, Mac and most of all ARM/Xscale.
    Oberon community is not a normal open source one. There are no 
parallel open projects, just private contributors. It gravitates around 
ETH team, waiting at the window. Probably the most important step in 
growing the spirit of this community is to purpose and open such a 
project. And if the target will be an application framework plus a 
database, I'll be on the list.

Dan Parnete