dbase replacement - replace

I have a few applications written in dbase 3 plus which I use for accounting purposes. Even though they get the job done I would like to migrate them to a modern language. What are my alternatives?

Without having any other skill sets that you can state, you can jump to almost anything. Me personally, coming from Visual Foxpro, and having exposure to object-oriented design, coding since 1993, it was a relatively easy shift into C#. As far as pushing into a different database from dBase III Plus, there is a ton of great support here in the MySql world along with all other languages too. Good luck.

Currently, commissioned me to migrate all my .dbf files to MySQL, a library, currently runs on Linux, developed in php, if you want to use it, here's the link and an example of how easy it generates .sql files
https://github.com/julio899/migracionesDBF
I hope you can be useful.
// folder containing DBF files
$directorio_de_archivos = "./DBFWEB/";
$archivos_dbf=array('01INV.DBF','01_INV.DBF','02_CHE.DBF','02_CPC.DBF');
foreach ($archivos_dbf as $key => $archivo) {
$ruta=$directorio_de_archivos.$archivo;
$obj=new DBF($ruta);
$obj->tabla_y_datos();
}

Related

Handling really large multi language projects

I am working on an really large multi language project (1000+ Classes + Configs + Scripts), with files distributed over network drives. I am having trouble fighting through the code, since the available Tools are not helping. The main problem is finding things. For the C++ Part: VS with VAX can only find files and symbols which are in the solution. A lot of them are not. Same problem with Reshaper. Right now i am stuck with doing unindexed string and file searches, which is highly inefficient on a network drive. I heared that SourceInsight would be an option since it allows you to just specify the folders that are part of the project and than indexes them, but my company wont spent money on it.
So my question ist: what Tools are there available to fight through an incredible large amount of code? And if possible they should be low cost or even free/open source.
Check out -
ctags
cscope
idutils
snavigator
In every one of these tools, you would have to invest(*) some time in reading the documentation, and then building your index. Consider switching to an editor that will work with these tools.
(*): I do mean invest, because it will reap dividends once you do.
hope this helps,
If you need to maintain a large amount of code, you really should have a source code managment system, a lot of them will help you find text by indexing all the files
And Most of them will work with various language.
Otherwise you can install some indexer like Apache Lucene and index all your files...
You should take a look at LXR. This is used by many Linux kernel source listings.
Try ndexer http://code.google.com/p/ndexer/
promises to Handle extremely large codebases!
The Perl program ack is also worth a look -- think of it as multi-file grep on steroids. The new version (in what I would call late beta) even lets you specify regexes for the files to process as well as regexes to search for -- a feature I've used extensively since it came out (I've got a subproject with 30k lines in 300+ classes, where this feature has been very helpful). You can even chain the new ack with itself so you can subselect the files to process.
VS with VAX can only find files and symbols which are in the solution. A lot of them are not.
You can add all the files that are not in your solution and set them to not build in the settings. Your VS build will not be affected by this, but now VS knows about those files and you can search them along with your VS native files.

How can I write my own 'filesystem' within Windows?

I've recalled using little 'filesystems' before that basically provided an interface to something else. For example, I believe there was a GMail filesystem that created an entry in My Computer and could be used like any other drive on your local computer. How can I go about implementing something like this in C++?
Thank you!
Try Dokan. It's like FUSE, except for Windows. I think there are certain limitations to namespace extensions, like they cannot be accessed from the command line, but I'm really not sure as of now.
Writing an actual file-system involves writing a driver; which means kernel-mode code (scary stuff) and paying for getting the IFS DDK. (edit: looks like they don't charge for it anymore)
What you probably want is a “namespace extension”.
Try this: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Namespace Extensions - CodeProject
This may be a starting point to extending NTFS in the way that the GMail filesystem used to do: Windows NT reparse points.
The GMail Filesystem is just the name given; it is not any filesystem as such. It is just a namespace extension for Windows Explorer that links with the GMail account of yours!
I dont know exactly what you are trying to do, but in anyway, I believe, the following link will be of some use to you:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188741.aspx
Just as a reference: virtual drives can be created using our Callback File System product, which is a supported, documented and maintained solution.
I was thinking of this too, perhaps some example code ? (email me if i forget plz ;p doin sdk now)
I'm thinking of a similar filesystem that would plug in as a driver and allow dynamic 'soft raid' on larger files mostly by putting them on more than one disk, perhaps some compression options and 'smart' filters to toggle usage in high disk space low usage and other situations more effectively, with status controls and indicators as a normalish program too
Seems like I would load the driver kit,
then i want the file writing event, and am mostly replacing fopen and similar functions automatically as an intermediate driver with a little windows network driver experience
I also heard good things about developing on a virtual machine for less crashing and more debugging
Also perhaps more metainfo on some or all files, including files in special folders with options too, including maybe both fast and simple (obfuscated and/or symmetic key) encryption options on folder, specified, all, letter, etc, or whatever, or the slower version and maybe integrated and optional (also profitable) online cvs-like diff style backups that mostly target changes to hot files for online backup at intervals and prices, mostly perhaps with matching keyboard events and might even be useful as simply a keylogging online backup service that is reasonably secure too
while avoiding common files like windows files or the normal stuff in the 'programs' directory that can be copied easily with pirate tools, unlike all of your documents.

Load Excel data into Linux / wxWidgets C++ application?

I'm using wxWidgets to write cross-plafrom applications. In one of applications I need to be able to load data from Microsoft Excel (.xls) files, but I need this to work on Linux as well, so I assume I cannot use OLE or whatever technology is available on Windows.
I see that there are many open source programs that can read excel files (OpenOffice, KOffice, etc.), so I wonder if there is some library that I could use?
Excel files it needs to support are very simple, straight tabular data. I don't need to extract any formatting except column/row position and the data itself.
Suggestedd reference: What is a simple and reliable C library for working with Excel files?
I came across other libraries (chicago on sf.net, xlsLib) but they seem to be outdated.
jrh
I can say that I know of a wxWidgets application that reads Excel .xls and .xlsx files on any platform. For the .xlsx files we used an XML parser and zip stream reader and grab the data we need, pretty easy to get going. For the .xls files we used: ExcelFormat, which works well and we found the author to be very generous with his support.
Maybe just some encouragement to give it a go? It was a couple of days work to get working.
Maybe http://www.libxl.com/ can help ?
I think that it is not something easy to do. xls files are quite complex and it is a proprietary format.
Maybe this is a stupid idea but why don't you upload and access your doc with Google docs. There are some apis to access your doc.
2 potential problems:
- Your app needs internet access
- Currently there is no C++ api.
But there are api for several languages including python see http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/gdata/articles/python_client_lib.html

library for doing diffs

I've been tasked with creating a tool that can diff and merge the configuration files for my company's product. The configurations are stored as either XML or URL-encoded strings. I'm looking for a library, preferably open source with a license compatible with commercial software, that can do these diffs. Our app is written in C++, so C++ libraries would be best, but I'm willing to look at libraries that are C#-specific since I can write a wrapper that exposes it to C++ via COM. Three-way diffs would be ideal, but two-way is acceptable. If it has an understanding of XML, that would also be a plus (since XML nodes can be reordered without changing the document, etc). Any library suggestions? Should I even consider writing my own diff tools in the hopes of giving it semantic knowledge of our formats?
Thanks to this similar question, I've already discovered this google library, which seems really great, but I'm still looking for other options. It also seems to be able to output the diffs in HTML format (using the <ins> and <del> tags that I didn't know existed before I discovered it), which could be really handy, but it seems to be a unified diff only. I'm going to need to display the results in a web browser, and probably have to build an interface for doing the merges in the browser as well. I don't expect a library to be able to help with these tasks, but it must produce output in a format that is amenable to me building this on top of it. I'm currently envisioning something along the lines of TortoiseMerge (side-by-side diffs, not unified), except browser-based. Any tips/tricks/design ideas on how to present this would be appreciated too.
Subversion comes with libsvn_diff and libsvn_delta licensed under Apache Software License.
Here is a C++ library that can diff what the author calls semistructured data. It deals nicely with HTML and XML. Since your data is XML it would make a lot of sense to use this instead of plain text diff. This is especially the case when the files are machine generated.
I am currently trying to use this library to build a tool that diffs Visual Studio project files. These are basically XML files and using a plain diff tool like Winmerge is too painful because Visual Studio pretty much mucks up the whole file by crazy reordering. The idea is to do some kind of a structured diff to address the problem.
For diffing the XML I would propose that you normalize it first: sort all the elements in alphabetic order, then generate a stream of tokens/xml that represents the original document but is independent of the original formatting. After running the diff, parse the result to get a tree containing what was added / removed.

Do you know of a good program for editing/translating resource (.rc) files?

I'm building a C++/MFC program in a multilingual environment. I have one main (national) language and three international languages. Every time I add a feature to the program I have to keep the international languages up-to-date with the national one. The resource editor in Visual Studio is not very helpful because I frequently end up leaving a string, dialog box, etc., untranslated.
I wonder if you guys know of a program that can edit resource (.rc) files and
Build a file that includes only the strings to be translated and their respective IDs and accepts the same (or similar) file in another language (this would be helpful since usually the translation is done by someone else), or
Handle the translations itself, allowing to view the same string in different languages at the same time.
In my experience, internationalization requires a little more than translating strings. Many strings when translated, require more space on a dialog. Because of this it's useful to be able to customize the dialogs for each language. Otherwise you have to create dialogs with extra space for the translated strings which then looks less than optimal when displayed in English.
Quite a while back I was using a translation tool for an MFC application but the company that produced the software stopped selling it. When I tried to find a reasonably priced replacement I did not find one.
Check out Lingobit Localizer. Expensive, but well worth it.
Here's a script I use to generate resource files for testing in different languages. It just parses a response from babelfish so clearly the translation will be about as high quality as that done by a drunken monkey, but it's useful for testing and such
for i in $trfile
do
key=`echo $i | sed 's/^\(.*\)=\(.*\)$/\1/g'`
value=`echo $i | sed 's/^\(.*\)=\(.*\)$/\2/g'`
url="http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr?doit=done&intl=1&tt=urltext&lp=$langs&btnTrTxt=Translate&trtext=$value"
wget -O foo.html -A "$agent" "$url" *&> /dev/null
tx=`grep "<td bgcolor=white class=s><div style=padding:10px;>" foo.html`
tx=`echo $tx | iconv -f latin1 -t utf-8 | sed 's/<td bgcolor=white class=s><div style=padding:10px;>\(.*\)<\/div><\/td>/\1/g'`
echo $key=$tx
done
rm foo.html
Check out appTranslator, its relatively cheap and works rather well. The guy developing it is really responsive to enhancement requests and bug report, so you get really good support.
You might take a look at Sisulizer http://www.sisulizer.com. Expensive though. We're evaluating it for use at my company to manage the headache of ongoing translation. I read on their About page that the company was founded by people who left Multilizer and other similar companies.
If there isn't one, it would be pretty easy to loop through all the strings in a resource a compare them to the international resources. You could probably do this with a simple grid.
In the end we have ended up building our own external tools to manage this. Our devs work in the english string table and every automated build sends our strings that have been added/changed and deleted to translation manager. He can also run a report at anytime from an old build to determine what is required for translation.
Check out RC-WinTrans. Its a commercial tool that my company uses. It basically imports our .RC files (or .resx files) into a database which we send to a different office for translation. The tool can then export a translated .RC file (or .resx file) for each language from the database. It even has a basic dialog box editor so the translator can adjust the size of various controls in the dialog box to be sure the translated text fits.
It also accepts a number of command line arguments and has a COM automation interface so you can integrate it into a build process more easily. It works quite well for us and we literally have thousands and thousands of strings and dialog boxes, etc.
(We currently have version 7 so what I've said might be a little bit different than their latest version 8.)
Also try AppTranslator: http://www.apptranslator.com/. It has a build-in resource editor so that translators can, for example, enlargen a text box when need bo. It has separate versions for developers and translators and much more.
We are using Multilizer (http://www.multilizer.com/) and although sometimes it's a bit tricky to use, at the end with a bit of patient it works pretty well.
We even have a translation web site where translators can download our projects and then upload the translations using Multilizer command-line features.
Managing localization and translations using .rc files and Visual Studio is not a good idea. It's much smarter (though counter-intuitive) to start localization through the exe. Read here why: http://www.apptranslator.com/misconceptions.html
I've written this recently, which integrates into VS:
https://github.com/ekkis/Powershell/blob/master/MT.ps1
largely because I was unsatisfied with the solutions out there. you'll need to get a client id from M$ (but they give you 2M words/month translation free - not bad)
ResxCrunch will be out soon, it will edit multiple resource files in multiple languages in one single table.