Re: pgAdmin vs. the competition

[Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume(at)lelarge(dot)info>]

Greg Smith a écrit :
> [...]
> For starters it seems to lack UI elements that have been in the GUI 
> world since Windows 3.11.

I think crossplatform development doesn't help on this issue. And 
wxWidgets seems, well, less interesting (in the UI) than Qt for example.

> Whenever PostgreSQL is busy the UI fails to 
> give any clue, no icon changes to a spinning hourglass, no status bar 
> filling up, not even a mindless pop-up saying "busy...".  This is 
> painfully obvious when doing a BACKUP or RESTORE.

For the backup/restore stuff, I don't think pgAdmin can actually do 
something better. We heavily rely on pg_dump/pg_restore. Any other UI 
tool would need to do the same.

> And even when either 
> task completes, the UI/text doesn't do much to even let me know it 
> worked.  In fact it just re-enables the buttons again, where at first 
> I'd click them and it would try to do the backup/restore again, which 
> really made me believe the whole operation failed."

Which lets me think he doesn't use the latest build (1.8).

> I forward this along not to pick on pgAdmin, which is hampered in 
> particular by being so cross-platform which Microsoft doesn't have to 
> worry about, but to point out this is a not particularly obvious way 
> PostgreSQL comparisions sometimes fail.  This is not even close to the 
> first time I've heard comments about how large the distance is between 
> pgAdmin and the SQL Manager software in particular is, just the first 
> time I could share the report.
>
> Something to chew on for those thinking about development resource 
> allocation...

I completely agree on this. pgAdmin is really far far far away from SQL 
Manager. But they have many more developers than us, and they don't have 
to handle crossdevelopment. We need to show our differences : remote 
configuration, Slony support, etc. Adding pgPool, pgPool-II and 
pgBouncer support would be great and is something I would like to add as 
soon as possible.


--
Guillaume.
 http://www.postgresqlfr.org
 http://dalibo.com