Rekall (Download of the Month)

Rekall (Download of the Month)

There has long been a gap in the array of software available for Linux: while there are excellent database engines - MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird all come to mind - there hasn't been a reasonably user-friendly front end for them; something that fills the space that dBASE III used to occupy for DOS and Access fulfils for Windows; something that lets novice programmers put together personal and small-business applications reasonably quickly. But here's a product that fills that gap nicely: Rekall.

Rekall is a graphical database front end that is reminiscent of Access. However, unlike Access, which has the Jet database engine built-in, Rekall is designed to work with a separate database engine. This makes it appropriate for prototyping, use as an add-on report generator, as a query front-end, all in conjunction with applications written in some other language. Having said that, Rekall is scriptable, using an event-driven model with the increasingly-popular Python as the scripting language, and makes a reasonable development environment in its own right, including syntax highlighting and a Python debugger.

Rekall is downloadable in source code form only, but building it is not difficult. You will have to have the various kde*-devel, python-devel and mysql-devel or postgresql-devel RPM packages installed, and then it's just a matter of using the following sequence of commands:

tar xzvf /path/to/rekall-2.2.0.tar.gz
cd rekall-2.2.0
./configure --prefix= /usr (on Red Hat and Mandrake; for SuSE use --prefix=/opt/kde3 )
make
su -
make install

Now you can run rekall from the command line or add it to the KDE menus.

When you first run the program, it runs a setup wizard which asks a series of questions about default settings. To create a new application, choose File -> New Database, which runs the database connection wizard, but you can cancel out of the wizard and manually configure the database connection. The main Rekall dialog lets you create and use forms, reports, queries components, macros and scripts; interestingly, these can either be stored on disk as files, or in a special table which Rekall will add to the database. Forms and reports can be auto-designed for any table in the database, or can be manually laid out when a form maps to multiple tables.

The query builder allows you to drag columns into the expression pane, as well as linking foreign to primary keys by drag-and-drop. After some early confusion, it only took me a few seconds to design my first query, and now that I've actually read the manual (Rekall Unbound - and it's pretty comprehensive) I shall be far faster in future. I haven't written an application from scratch with Rekall yet, but it looks like this is the excuse I needed to really get into Python programming.

Price: $0

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