BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

https://beebase.sourceforge.io

by LkpPo • 2 years ago

237 67 2 years ago

beebase.sourceforge.io

LkpPo• 2 years ago

Good morning,

I wanted to introduce this little, unpretentious piece of software, which is intended as a small programmable database for hobbyists, like a mini Access but with a scripting language for those who like parentheses.

Your opinions are welcome.

Regards,

psadri• 2 years ago

Great! This reminds me of FileMaker and similar RAD desktop tools. Curious to know what kind of projects people are using it for?

pkphilip• 2 years ago

Very nice! Looks great!

May I suggest that you have a "Get Started" button right on the home page itself with a very basic tutorial?

SuperHeavy2562• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I was looking for something just like this actually.

ComodoHacker• 2 years ago

Is there any technical docs on internals? How it does I/O, caching, consistency, concurrency etc.?

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

that's probably not what this is aimed at. especially as most people have SSDs and loads[1] of ram

[1] compared to the days of filemaker

hilti• 2 years ago

Amiga?! Just reading this warmed my heart. Awesome project - congratulations!

SuperHeavy2562• 2 years ago

Man, that tutorial was difficult to read. No images or GIFs?

larodi• 2 years ago

Cool that it runs on Amiga. I’d love to see a local store use Amiga based UI for the warehouse. Also the fact it was started as another project in 1994 makes it double cool.

rho4• 2 years ago

How does it compare to MS Access or FileMaker?

layer8• 2 years ago

It runs on the Amiga.

vincnetas3• 2 years ago

Ok so first feedback. Launched app. Went to create a new table. Entered name : "users". Got error "Invalid name". Got confused, whats illegal about the name. After some time figured out that name must start with UPPER case latter.

This could have been the error message instead of generic "Invalid name".

cess117• 2 years ago

It's explained on page 8 of the manual, in the tutorial section.

carlmr• 2 years ago

Exactly, it's a bad error message if you need to read 8 pages of tutorial to get that basic feedback.

PurpleRamen• 2 years ago

Comments like this are the reason why I will not touch software like this. I can live with the old school-style and the limited ability set sold on the webpage. But someone bringing up a legit complain and then receiving such hostile behavior, speaks for a toxic community or user hostile developers. And it's not limited to this one comment, but there are several collect here.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

It's a poor restriction. The table name I want is 収入. Now what?

brktime3• 2 years ago

True, this could be improved. Note though that if you hover over the text entry box, there is a tool tip that says this:

Name of the field. Must begin with an uppercase letter followed by further letters, digits or underscore characters. Non-ASCII letters like German umlauts are not allowed.

vincnetas3• 2 years ago

Apparently saved project created with BeeBase is basically a sqlite DB, that you can open with any sqlite browser. So i think a lot of value could come from standardised sqlite format, upon which you could build different UI's to manipulate the content of said sqlite DB and then provide a app that would build client UI based on content of same sqlite file.

cess117• 2 years ago

You can export to SQLite3, but not import it back in again.

vincnetas3• 2 years ago

What i mean is that you can save a project and just open saved file as sqlite file. Without need to export anything. That file contains all information needed for app. User data plus meta data used by BeeBase.

fermuch• 2 years ago

No? I haven't tried it yet, but in the docs it says "SQLite3 file format, and import and export facility"

brktime3• 2 years ago

Yes, BeeBase uses the sqlite3 file format. You can make changes to the sqlite3 file with other SW, but there are some rules to be followed if you want BeeBase to work with those changes. More info is in the manual here: https://beebase.sourceforge.io/index.php?page=documentation&...

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

30 rows from multiple tables in a 1024*786 screen (wild guess). I was part of a rewrite of an app, that previously crammed 30 rows into a small screen, and 10 rows after.

ljsocal• 2 years ago

Reminds me a bit of Lotus Agenda. That never made it out of DOS (except in Hobbs, the unreleased prototype Windows version)

zokier2• 2 years ago

Honestly I think LibreOffice Base (and its brethren) are underappreciated and underdeveloped pieces of software these days. In 80s/90s stuff like dBase and Access seemingly were relatively popular, but that whole category of software seems to have mostly died out which is imho a shame. I suppose Access being somewhat notoriously horrible has something to do with that, suffocating the whole field. Considering how much business users are stretching Excel to fill the gap, I do think there would be demand for better options. I guess Airtable etc are the modern alternatives.

I find it just a shame that databases as a concept is something that has been relegated to be hidden deep in the backends and accessed only by specialized DB admins or through narrow and leaky APIs; SQL is considered arcane wizardry instead of being suitable for technical business users like afaik it was originally envisioned as.

humanfromearth9• 2 years ago

I haven't seen anything that beats the UI and UX of FileMaker Pro from the 90s.

nxobject2• 2 years ago

Truthfully, given the backwards compatibility of Windows and Wine, you could still get away in this day and age with sticking with it as a solution.

octopoc• 2 years ago

Has FileMaker Pro changed / improved / worsened significantly since then? The latest release is FileMaker Pro 2023.

buescher• 2 years ago

Agreed if FileMaker would do what you needed. 1990s FileMaker was not really relational, right? To be painfully fair to Microsoft, Access was more powerful and did a nice job of balancing capability and UX.

For many contemporary use cases where one might have used FileMaker in the nineties, there’s SharePoint lists and PowerBI.

lysecret• 2 years ago

Notion is putting the database in the Center in a way.

zem3• 2 years ago

to give some perspective, there is an app i've written as a complicated google sheets script, which would have been way simpler to maintain as a desktop app, but what the end-users want is the ability to have multiple people use it from multiple devices at once. that's become table stakes for a lot of software now, and it's really what has killed desktop apps for stuff like this.

zubairq• 2 years ago

Very interesting point that multiuser killed desktop apps. Couldn’t desktop apps implement multiuser?

egeozcan• 2 years ago

BeeBase is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Amiga

What a nice surprise!

How do you test? Could you automate it?

nxobject2• 2 years ago

Beyond your computer/workstation, I'd love if there was a personal database program that could also access via your phone, so you can use it on the go (even via dynamic DNS if needed) – modern no-code platforms do that, but data sovereignty would be nice.

xet7• 2 years ago

Try:

https://www.nubuilder.com

https://github.com/nuBuilder/nuBuilder-4.5

Willamin• 2 years ago

Lately I've started using a barebones SQLite DB for this and a GUI DB editor program (TablePlus, which happens to have an iOS app as well).

I'd always relied on ORMs in whatever web application I used to interact with DBs for the most part, but I've recently been learning more about views, triggers, and more complex relations. It's been insightful and I've found that much of what I want from a program like BeeBase is covered by knowing more SQL.

----

That being said, I'd love to see what you described too. I don't mean for this to be like the infamous "why do you need dropbox when you have rsync" comment. I just wanted to give an anecdotal alternative to use until someone creates what you described!

rambambram• 2 years ago

Try good ol' PHPMyAdmin from your local webhosting company!? The view on a mobile screen in portrait mode is not even that bad.

sesm• 2 years ago

From a cursory glance, the Lisp dialect that BeeBase is using is closest to Common Lisp, is that correct? Sorry, I'm not an expert on CL, but it would be great to see a quick comparison of BeeBase Lisp with other popular Lisp dialects, like this: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps

brktime3• 2 years ago

Yes, it is close, although it is completely homebrewn and lacks a lot of functionality of common lisp. Think of it as taking the syntax from lisp, some basic lisp functions, and then adding functionality for programming your database.

hgyjnbdet• 2 years ago

I have to use Access at work. Im wondering if this could be a replacement. Certainly LO Base is not, much as I'd want it to be.

I suppose it depends on whether the scripting language can do what vba can, especially with regards to xslx files.

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

Javascript and python supposedly are coming to excel.

hpeter• 2 years ago

I've been asked to develop python scripts for libreoffice and it was not fun.

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Microsoft Access in the 90s. We used that to run our entire repair business and it worked great.

Self-Perfection• 2 years ago

I believe I have seen something similar on Maemo but cannot find it now.

BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

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