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What is kort

Kort is a glue. Kort is a small piece of glue that makes the following thingies stick together:

with intent of letting user to produce form applications that have TCL-programmable intelligence and stupidity and ability to store stuff in relational manners. MySQL is used to store data, (n)curses2 to make textual presentations of the data in the database, TCL to mangle the data and UDP to throw it between kort instances running on same or remote computer(s).

Data in the MySQL is stored in tables. Kort has concept of record, that is one batch of data fetched and manipulated at time and one record is stored in one database table in MySQL, in one row. ncurses is used in form-mode, one record displayed at once. User may change values in record and issue commands that do thingies with the record. One possibility for a command is script of TCL commands that is given the values from the displayed record, after the TCL script ends the values are copied back to form and displayed for user. Kort uses UDP/IP to communicate between instances of kort. You may run kort in several machines or several times in same box. Each instance using the same database registers itself to certain database table. From that table instances of kort may query about existence of other running instances and send and receive messages to/from each other.

With this kind of glue it is possible to create applications that store data to DB and let users manipulate that data. Applications are created by creating a database schema and writing a application definition with certain syntax that is fed to kort.

Kort is written in Objective C and internally uses either wchar_t or UTF-8 unicode for string presentation so kort should be ok for expressing things in any language that is written from left to right.

Footnotes

  1. Yes, curses is entirely text-based environment, just as you did get used to using a mouse for controlling applications, you can forget about it :-)

  2. Some implementations of curses don't implement wide character support that kort desperately needs, if you lack such functionality, please install ncurses from http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ncurses.html