Chapter 1. Introduction and overview

1.1. What is Mergeant?

Mergeant is a program which enables the user to work with data stored in a database (using an external database engine) in a convenient way. For this he needs to provide some information that Mergeant is unable to obtain from the database (such as the relations between several table's fields). Once such data is provided, the user can design queries in a graphical way, and use these queries to find some data in the database, modify it, insert some new, etc.

Mergeant uses the LibGda library to connect to a database engine (DBMS), so many DBMS can be accessed (Mergeant can manage data from the most common ones such as Oracle, MySql or PostgreSQL).

In the future, Mergeant will allow the user to design widgets which will then be used from within Mergeant, and in external applications (provided by Mergeant at the runtime of the external applications), using the Bonobo technology.