February 2008

I'm still promising to myself that I need to package up the sourcesafe2subversion tool changes with a public installer. I've had some great contributions with some great changes and I kind of ought to be making it more easy to get hold of. In the meantime, continue to email for requests (kirit at kirit dot com) and I am allowing access to my Subversion repository to people who want to get the newer version now.

Upcoming FOST.3™ changes

What I have been mostly working on in my spare time is adding PostgreSQL support to FOST.3™. So far I have the database interfaces restructured and libpqxx compiled and working. By a strange twist of fate Joroen (who is the principle author and maintainer of libpqxx) is also based in Thailand so I've been trying out what is going to be the new version and we've had some very intersting (and very geeky) chats about C++, O/RMs and the appalling lack of proper transaction management in most frameworks (not to mention popular databases).

This work is also part of a wider move to provide a path to a Linux port of FOST.3. By adding first Postgres support and then Python language bindings we will be able to provide components that will integrate properly into a Linux environment. On Windows there will be a choice of Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Express and Postgres (on Linux only Postgres) and for scripting Windows will offer COM and Python bindings (and use JavaScript or Python internally), whilst on Linux it will only offer Python. Both platforms will have the C++ O/RM.

We're also looking at developing a REST API to the O/RM platform which will decouple it further from other languages and open the possiblity of creating some really interesting AJAX based applications using FOST.3 and will open it up to use by other languages and platforms. Eventually it will be intersting to add other database backends, especially non-RDBMS ones like CouchDB, Thrudb and Amazon's Simple DB.

Upcoming Mahlee™ changes

For Mahlee™ the next release will have an interactive shell. This will allow us to explore a lot of the FOST.3 functionality, but might also be an interesting command shell for use as an alternative to Microsoft's Powershell. I don't really know yet how well the threading support will work in shell environment, but it'll be an interesting experiment whatever the conclusions there are.

Support and issue tracking

If you're on Windows and want to try out a support and issue tracking system get in touch. The features that we have ready right now are:

• Wiki/blog/forums (the one that runs this site)
• Issue tracking
• Cookbook (the one that runs the Boost Cookbook)

We're using the system internally with great success so thought we'd see if anybody else was interested.