RemObjects SDK 3.0

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Aug 312004
 

Because Perry blogged about DataAbstract, I dug a little deeper into it, and to RemObjects other product “RemObjects SDK 3.0”.

RO SDK is basically a collection of components to create multi-tier solutions, and it can be clients or servers. There are other products that can help you with that. Think of Midas, or Borlands new DataSnap. But the RO SDK is more than that. With it you can not only create multi-tier applications, but you can also choose whether the application will use the SOAP protocol, or a binary version without the overhead of XML. And you can create ISAPI modules, but also standalone SOAP-servers. Or…a whatever server.

So, that got me thinking. I emailed Perry, and asked him if it was possible to create a normal Win32-server, like a mailserver. His answer was positive, so I read some more about RO SDK. RO SDK gives you the tools to create a server, that can communicate in standardized protocols or in a protocol that you like. On the standard firewall-save HTTP-port, or on any port you like. And on top of that: the SDK is expandable. So if TCP is not what you’re looking for, you can implement your own transport-drivers and use them in RO SDK.

Wow!

I already downloaded the trial version of the SDK and I will give it a try when I get back from my holiday in Morocco (4-26th of September). I was planning to create a mailserver with a RDBMS-backend. By choosing a RDBMS that is scalable the the mailserver itself will be scalable. By making it multi-tier the user has even more freedom in distributing the load.

 Posted by at 10:57

DataAbstract

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Aug 262004
 

Perry blogs about Remobjects’ DataAbstract. I can’t decide whether DA is a good thing or not. Back in the old days, BDE was a good thing and so was ODBC. But we soon realized that you could not use native database-calls, only standardized ones. And it was slower than native calls, because an extra in-between layer was introduced. From what I read about it, DA is no different. It makes a programmers job easier, that’s good about it. But I can’t figure out if DA is another BDE/ODBC or if this is really a good product. I know their RemObjects SDK is.

 Posted by at 00:04

Sybase dbExpress – part 2

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Jul 312004
 

The dbExpress drivers for Sybase work perfectly. Enabling/querying seems very fast, although I haven’t really created anything decent. Let’s design the databasestructure first.

 Posted by at 00:23

Changes to the dbExpress configuration

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Jul 302004
 

In the dbExpress drivers you can download from SDN, two changes are needed. One in dbxconnections.ini:

DataBase=ASA 9.0 Sample

instead of DataBase=ASA 8.0 Sample. Not mandatory, just for the ethics 😉

The other change should be made to dbxdrivers.ini:

VendorLib=dbodbc9.dll

instead of VendorLib=dbodbc8.dll. The new version of SQL Anywhere Studio has no dbodbc8.dll.

 Posted by at 00:34

SQL Anywhere Studio installation

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Jul 302004
 

…occupies only 100MB of diskspace. I selected all features. When I install Oracle (9 or 10) it is about 2GB (with sample database), and that does NOT include a personal DB like MSDE or support for PDA’s. Sounds good sofar.

 Posted by at 00:06

Sybase SQL Anywhere

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Jul 292004
 

Just today I stumbled upon Sybase SQL Anywhere. Of course I had heard of Sybase before, but I never looked at it because of its price. But that’s ASE, the Enterprise edition. For smaller companies and/or developers, there is SQL Anywhere Studio. As far as I can see now, SAS for Windows costs about US$399.

What remains is DAC’s for Delphi. It seems there are dbExpress drivers, but the document doesn’t tell me if they will work with Delphi 6 (they refer to Delphi 7 and Octane). Let’s hope so.
There are third party DAC’s, but they are not as common as DACs for SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle.

SQL Anywhere Studio includes a personal database (like MSDE/SQL Server Express), ASA (the client/server-version of the database) and UltraLite, to be deployed on PDA’s.

The Developer Edition of SQL Anywhere Studio is free! I’ll have a try with that and see if it’s any good. If the mailserver turns out to be a usable product and I will be using it myself (of course) I can always buy a non-developer license.

 Posted by at 16:04

Mailserver progress

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Jul 272004
 

The mailserver is slowly (very slowly, I’ve been reading blogs too much!) progressing into something. See this screenshot:

 Posted by at 23:34

A free edition of Borland Together

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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.

 Posted by at 22:40
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