Mac OS X's native directory service is called Open Directory.Įvery Mac OS X computer includes a local Open Directory database - referred to as a domain - that stores information about local user accounts. These services provide a database for central account management for both user and computer, as well as a framework for sharing that information among workstations and servers. Unfortunately it's quite complex, and not really designed to be a common interface to databases, but rather a sort of data abstraction layer where you work with objects and never see any SQL.Directory services are a critical component of any enterprise environment. I remember being quite fed up with the BDE at the time, and eventually started using a set of native ODBC components that someone developed.Ĭocoa does have a sort of rich data framework that you refer to: Core Data.
I don't know about the driver quality I suspect Windows ODBC drivers are quite good, whereas JDBC has been favoured by the server/enterprise world for a while, and I would not be surprised if UnixODBC drivers were a bit behind the times.Īs for the Borland dev tools, they also used their own proprietary data source tech: The BDE (Borland Database Engine), which had an ODBC bridge built in. It's also unevenly implemented: On Windows there's native Microsoft-provided ODBC (but in terms of focus it has been superceded by ADO, which superceded OLE DB, which was supposed to be the replacement for ODBC - it's not like Microsoft ever settles on a single technology), and on Unix there's UnixODBC. ODBC is fairly complex (both to work against and to implement providers for) and is very much tied to relational databases. They simply do not affect people using GTk or Qt, in practice. The real issue is dissuading others from supporting Linux because of non-existent fragmentation issues. I would also like to clarify that I understand an OS X user wanting to write an OS X-only program. That would give you a native look on all the platforms you support. And the sort of people who have very odd and customized systems can fix problems themselves.ĮDIT: Also, you could use wxWidgets. Basically, everybody can use everybody else's programs on Linux, with the exception of very odd or customized systems. Really, fragmentation like this is not nearly the issue people make it out to be. Moreover, all the popular environments support both GTk and Qt fairly well, and both are cross-platform, so you would actually be supporting more users than with a Mac OS-only program.
I don't see why the desktop environment would matter-the program doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) care whether I'm on Gnome or KDE or Unity. That's just patently untrue: either GTk or Qt would work perfectly. UPDATE: Looks like someone has already submitted a pull request for the "no feedback on wrong credentials" bug I mentioned, and I created a ticket for the resize issue. If you decide to use it (and please do, because I want this to work), be sure to have your Mac's system log opened in console, so you can see what's going on. Also, trying to resize the window turned everything white for me and the app had to be rebooted. If you put the wrong credentials in, there's no feedback, it just seems like nothing happened. It only supports postgres and redis right now. With that in mind, just to warn everyone, this is very alpha-level software.
Having them all available in the same app would be amazing. My apps are pretty evenly divided at this point between MySQL, Postgres, and MongoDB, and I don't see that trend going away any time soon (we always pick the db that makes the most sense for each particular project). This idea is friggin awesome and definitely something I'd pay for.