The mailserver is slowly (very slowly, I’ve been reading blogs too much!) progressing into something. See this screenshot:
Jul 272004
Jul 272004
Jul 272004
More Borland news: they are giving away Together for free. Okay, okay, they created a special edition, that can be downloaded for free. It’s a 60MB download that can be found here. The press release about this Borland-Together-for-the-masses is here.
I’m not sure why there is no integration with Delphi, at least the Together productpages don’t mention it.
Jul 272004
Yesterday I created the basics of a mailserver with the Indy 9 components. To avoid cluttering the main form, I’ve put the components on a Data Module, but that was not a good idea. Moving them to the main form made the code compile and run.
{note to self: Data Modules are for database-components}
As a database, I need a database that can either run embedded and be extended to client-server. FlashFiler 2 from TurboPower can do that, and so does NexusDB, but the free version of NexusDB has a limitation of 1 database per app, 5 tables per db, and 10000 rows per table. Not sure if that will do the trick for a mailserver. Buying (US$900) just to create a proof-of-concept seems a little irrational, even to me.
The plan to create a working mailserver is:
– design data model
– implement basic database structure
– implement accounts/aliasses/maillists
– implement receiving and storing messages for accounts/aliasses/maillists
– setup domainstructure / relaying-settings
– implement POP3 retrieval
– ask friends to test this version 🙂
If things get this far, and things go well, the following items are on the to-do list:
– logging
– basic anti-spam features
– basic anti-virus features
– IMAP4 capabilities
– external POP3-mailbox retrieval
– ODBC (or native Oracle/MSSQL) to support other databases for account/message-storage
– …
Jul 232004
I’m not sure when Oracle started this initiative, but it seems that Oracle can be had for free if you’re a ISV. You must be a member of OTN, but it seems that the kit for Linux and Windows will be sent to you if you fill in all the information. The kit includes the 10g database, the latest application server and “Tools software” (not exactly sure what that means). So head over to their website, and fill in your information.
Jul 152004
I played around with NexusDB lite, the free version of NexusDB. NexusDB is a C/S database system, that can be used embedded as well. In that case, your exe is both the client and the server.
NexusDB Lite, currently at version 1.07, has 3 restrictions/limitations: you can only open 1 database per application, you can only have 5 tables per database and you can only have 10000 rows per table. That sums to 50000 rows in total. Not a problem for initial setup or serious testing.
All standard datacontrols recognize the nx-components, so you should not have any trouble converting/creating your application.
It’s a little to early to give my judgement, but from what I know now, I can say that the server and the components work pretty smooth. The only thing I have against NexusDB at the moment are the strange datatypes. ShortString, WideString, NullString. Make up your mind. Where my (VAR)CHAR? And why an Int8, Int16, Int32 and Int64? What’s wrong with Shortint, Int, LongInt? Okay, okay, I’ll stop whining. It’s not Oracle. And it is free, so who cares?
Jul 142004
Yesterday I had a good day in my mental/personal(/midlife?) crisis, so I started Delphi just to do some programming. Nothing real, just playing around. A while ago, I downloaded SuiPack, from SuniSoft, so I installed that.
Let me tell you about the installation first. You start the installer, and in less that a minute a message is showed that the installation is complete. Okay, I thought, I haven’t even noticed something.
Starting Delphi again gave me 4 more tabs in the pallette: SuiPack, SuiPack DB, SuiDialogs and SuiUtils. The first one is so filled with components, that it doesn’t even fit on one page. It seems to contain just about any object you already know! SuiPack DB holds the components that are database-aware. SuiDialogs hold some predefined dialogs and then there are some utils.
Working with the components is easy. Converting old projects is easy too. Just drop a converter-component on your form, and suiPack will try to convert all components to the Sui-counterpart. If you don’t use too many third party components, converting should give you no problem. Switching themes on the fly is easy. Just drop a SuiThemeManager on the form, double-click it to select which components will be effected and at runtime change the SuiThemeManager.SuiUIStyle to something else. A predefined theme, or something you load from a file. It’s already in there.
Two thumbs up for this product. Its price is good too. Individual licenses are $59, or $99 with full source. Corporate licenses are more expensive, but still very cheap if you have a couple of developers on your payroll.
Jul 072004
I tried to install PostgreSQL, the 7.5 binary development night-build (since I can’t build it from source). The basic procedure is:
- Unzip in directory, let's assume C:PostgreSQL
- Add C:PostgreSQLBin and C:PostgreSQLlib to PATH
- Add environmentvariable PGDATA and have it point to C:PostgreSQLData
- Now start the following command: initdb -L "C:/postgresql/share"
First problem encountered: PostgreSQL won’t run as admin. So I created a limited-user (I’m using Windows XP Pro) and logged in as that user. The init-command now crashes with an unhandled exception. Can’t see what it is, or what to do about it. Just a message that somebody is sorry for the inconvenience (you know what I’m talking about!).
Let’s wait a while until 7.5 with the real Windows installer is there. In some online documents I read that this Windows support was supposed to be included in version 7.4 already. But hey, who cares about tons of users?
Jul 072004
Since I participate in the RC-72 contest of Distributed.net, I regularly visit the stats pages. A while ago, the guys switched from Sybase to PostgreSQL as their database of choice. On the statspages the PostgreSQL-logo is displayed, so I clicked it recently.
PostgreSQL looks like a good choice if you are, like me, accustomed to Oracle. I hope version 7.5 will bring a decent Windows version, since Cygwin is not something I like very much. But tablespaces, replication, foreign-keys and subselects are things I do like. I’ll let you guys know when I installed it, and what my findings are.
Jul 052004
I just finished installing an old (U2W) SCSI disk in the server. It was a remainder of the old Linux server, too good to leave unused. It’s only 9.1GB, but fast ones!
I also installed Smarty on the server. Being a (PHP-) template engine, it can be used to build just about anything. I’ll expirement with it, and let you know if it is of any use. The company’s website still needs to be build, so perhaps this is the time to do so. Templates are fun and simple, so it should not be a problem.