ODBCKit - News

19/16/2011 - Push to 1.0

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:01:00 -0500

After a good bit of time away working on projects that are built on ODBCKit, we are returning to ODBCKit to integrate some changes that have been made in our work but also to really get the polish on it that will make it a 1.0 release.

In terms of what this means for you, it all boils down to usability. As we see it, there 5 things that need to happen.

* Complete Framework Reference Document
* Complete Sample Applications and Document them
* Build a proper installer
* Refine any code that is not up to standard.
* Ensure that any application that embeds the ODBCKit is sandbox ready

Notice that there is one item not on the list. Prepared Statements, We do not find that we need them and are willing to go to 1.0 without them. There has been almost no demand for them in our support channels. Given that, it is a project that we have now done 3 times and we haven't found a single implementation we 'like'.

Someone recently asked why this has taken so long. The short answer, is that money has been tight, and we have focused on work that had a significant upside on the income side. This one was great during the push to open source, but donations dried up thereafter. At this point, we have been working on things internally, but haven't had the time to update the public presence as to what is going on.

Some of the underlying changes that have come about are interesting, others may have no value outside of our needs. We leave it to the audience to determine which is which.

11/19/2010 - Release Day

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:58:00 -0500

Moving forward, we are trying to switch to a weekly project where each week we work exclusively on a given project. Each week that project rotates. This week was ODBC Week. Next week is TinyFugue week, week after would be PostgreSQL, then Unnamed Project for a week and then back to ODBC. There will be times when the schedule gets shuffled, but it seems that if we do not schedule things, we run out of time to get the things we want to do, done.

The result is this. In the last week we have made a bunch of changes and enhancements and more importantly started the planning for the next stages of development. The result is a new release, with another one coming five weeks from today. This release has some nice features and has gotten the Query Tool to a point where we are using it for our daily work now. That in turn leads to more enhancements as we really get a feel for what it lacks.

This week also celebrated an interesting birthday. It was 5 years ago that we started working on this project, and created the beginnings of what it is now. It took several months, but we had a foundation and then in 2006 we did the 'donation' drive that led to the project becoming BSD licensed and Open Source. We will be doing a write up on that subject over on Dru's blog sometime in the coming weeks, but to celebrate 5 years of the project was fun. It was also dissappointing to see that Apple still hasn't done anything to make OS X development more friendly to the RDBMS world. At least that leaves us our space to work in.

11/16/2010 - Current Work

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:30:35 -0500

If you monitor SVN, you will be seeing quite a bit of activity for the rest of this week as we make a bunch of little fixes and changes to the code. These changes are in prep for a new rollup release including all the changes from the last couple of months as well as incorporate some ideas that we have been tinkering with and have decided to move forward with. Much of the work that is going on here originates with another project that we have been working on. That project will be appearing in part here, as it is a new engine to power the news being displayed by this page and specifcally the RSS feed behind it. This feed is going to move into a database and be powered by a FastCGI script written in Cocoa and using the ODBCKit itself to display the news. That code will be made available as an example for others to use, hopefully by the end of this week.

08/23/2010 - 2011?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:45:20 -0500

Looking forward to 2011, the ODBCKit continues it's evolution. We really haven't had a whole lot to say about the ODBCKit because for the most part, it is now stable, with few radical changes being made. At this point, all ODBCKit changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But that doesn't mean that it is dead. As a matter of fact, we use it internally every day and have seen several enhancements to it as we find little things.

Because of that, we are working on finishing up some documentation and then we are going to release the ODBCKit as it stands as a 1.0. Tied with that, we are going to launch a round of fundraising for the next project in the ODBCKit world. Query Tool, is quite frankly, garbage. It was never really intended to be a general purpose tool, but that is certainly what it turned into. With that in mind, we are going to do another round of fund raising to see if we can raise the revenue to get a new implementation of the Query Tool that we have been using internally as the replacement.

In the past we did our fund raising after the project was more or less working. We plan to do the same with this. Dru is working on cleaning up our internal Query Tool (nQuery:ODBC) and getting it ready for a 0.1 public release. In it's first iteration, it is a simple replacement for the Query Tool. It contains and query editor, a result viewer, an export tool (CSV or XML) and a query library. While it will still handle .sql files, there is a new .nquery file bundle that allows for saving a group of queries into a s single file to be used on a connection.

Like our previous fund raising effort, the plan is to set a fixed dollar amount as our target, and when we reach that amount, the new tool will join the rest of the toolkit as open source under a BSD license. At the moment, that number is planned to $20,000 total. This works out to roughly 3 months of billable time for one of us, which is what we estimate we already have in the nQuery project.

In addition, we are working to make a template available for users that wish to use ODBCKit to write CGI scripts using Objective-C.

01/12/2010 - 0.9.0 Prep Work Nearing Wrap Up

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:13:41 -0500

Well, in the next few days the 0.9.0 work will wrap up. The ODBCCommand class that was the original implementation of the prepared statement has gone away. It has been replaced by a new class name ODBCPreparedStatement. Also added was a new ODBCStatement class, which is not required but offers some a slightly more JDBC like implementation that should ease the transition for the developers familiar with JDBC.

Also in 0.9.0 is a massive rework to address a bunch of little memory issues, though we believe after testing that Instruments is coming up with some false positives on the leak front as sometimes running the exact same test cases it finds some, and others it doesn't. That work has been extremely time consuming, but ultimately, very rewarding as performance and memory have both been improved.

With those changes out of the way, the path from 0.9.0 to 1.0 is all about bug fixes and documentation and advocacy. Look for an upcoming article about getting started with ODBC as well as work to build many more examples from this foundation.

As always, we look forward to any thoughts you may have on where to go next.

10/21/2009 - The Immediate Future and the not so immediate future...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:13:41 -0500

Like many projects, this one has been a long time in maturing. At this point, the ODBCKit is usable and stable for use in projects. We know of several projects that are either in development or deployed using ODBCKit. The basics work, and seem to work fairly well. The things that are missing are completely missing, not incomplete, missing.

This is by intent.

Until we feel that the ODBCCommand class is completed, we are keeping it out of the published framework. The natural extension of ODBCKit to support some more ORB/ORM features is well in the future. So what is the road map?

While not set in stone, the plan is to see if anything crops up with the current 0.4.1 release between today and November 1. Assuming nothing shows up, the currently available 0.4.1 will be retagged as 0.5 and released as the last build before we start a series of 0.9.x builds that will include the Prepared Statment support. These will start November 10, and we expect to have a 3 week cycle of 0.9.x releases. With a full blown release of a 1.0 framework on December 1.

Once 1.0 is released, the focus on ODBCKit will switch from development to advocacy, and documentation. This will be predicatd on the continued expansion of a sample codebase as well as extensive enhancements to the Query Tool, and the associated objects. It has reached time to take this project to the next level of visibility. One of those tasks is to generate an small graphic badge that can be used by ODBCKit users to help with the advocacy push. Another will be building examples to make it easier to learn how to use the ODBCKit.