On Mon, 12 May 2008 05:32:26 +0200, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:

> Hi all,
> Sorry for jumping to this thread so late, but it was weekend and I was  
> far from my computer :)
> A little team of students and I are developing SqueakDBX... It is just  
> the begining, but we hope to provide a realiable DB plugin, who uses  
> asyncronic calls for performing the queries (and OpenDBX do that). This  
> project was rejected from SoC (the comunity felt that other projects  
> were more importat),

Well, we asked GSoC for many more slots for our 20+ registered  
applications, got one but not six more, and so many projects (among them  
yours) could not make it.

> but we kept working on, and now it is listed as a possible SummerTalk  
> project.

Good news & good to see that you're keen to "sell" your project :)

> Currently, the code in www.squeaksource.com/SqueakDBX is just a proof of  
> concept and little more, but we are very exited about the preliminar  
> results. Of course, OpenDBX currently runs only on *nix systems (and  
> OSX, of course), and not windows, but I think it wont be difficult to  
> migrate it to windoze... Norbert, the mantainer of OpenDBX is very  
> helpful.

The way I see it (and I offered that opinion to Igor in email) is, that  
the OpenDBX project doesn't see much value in the MS$ platform. So many  
releases but no attempt for a port, not even a plan on their homepage (and  
Slashdot doesn't know about OpenDBX). You might want to take the many  
failed projects into consideration, for example Chilli and ADOdb, to name  
a few. We don't want to be locked in and Igor+my drafted a plan which  
explicitly avoids that and lets us put our effort *only* on our parts and  
*not* on theirs (except bug reports).

None of us (incl. your team?) is in the professional DB business and all  
we can do is use existing modules (like OpenDBX) as soon as there is  
years-long support available and they proved to perform very well on the  
MS$ platform and receive the respective DB vendor(s) support. We're  
talking about very expensive enterprise DB's and that's a point at which  
I'm not willing to accept a single compromise in our project.

> I invite you (Igor, Rob, Klaus and all the interested in developing a  
> modern DB plugin) to join efforts, not duplicating them.

Last night Igor designed the module layer and convinced me that OpenDBX  
can easily be made an external module (mini-driver) once it's available.  
Our project intends to support more than just one such mini-driver,  
loadable on demand. Part of this is Igor's mini-driver API which is all  
that needs to be adapted for making a new external DB module. And Igor  
insists on our plugin to manage multiple native threads and their db  
sessions; wink, blink ;)

Now, unfortunately MS$ is the platform that Rob and Frank want *now* and  
so OpenDBX is, for a loong, loong time, out of reach for us. This is also  
the reason behind our project, the *absence* of MS$ platform support.

We intend to avoid duplication by matching your project with our draft,  
and then see what can be re-used or needs to be rewritten + added. Perhaps  
your team can jump in with review+feeback, that would be great! :)

/Klaus

> Thanks,
> Esteban
>
> On 2008-05-11 12:02:07 -0300, "Rob Rothwell" <r.j.rothwell at gmail.com>  
> said:
>
>>   Klaus,
>>  I would be happy to help any way I can!  I and co-worker have access to
>> Oracle, SQL server, Postgres, MySQL, DB2, and KBase data sources, to  
>> name a
>> few.  And we are definitely good at "breaking" things.
>>  Not so long ago, I was a decent assembly language programmer, but have  
>> never
>> written a Squeak plugin before and still consider myself to be on the
>> "novice" end of the Smalltalk spectrum, although I am starting to turn  
>> the
>> corner.
>>  Thanks for the invitation,
>>  Rob
>>  On 5/11/08, Klaus D. Witzel <klaus.witzel at cobss.com> wrote:
>>>  On Sat, 10 May 2008 21:08:53 +0200, Rob Rothwell wrote:
>>>  On 5/10/08, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>  2008/5/10 Rob Rothwell :
>>>>>  I can help with windoze port of openDbx. Lets hope its wouldn't be  
>>>>> too
>>>>> hard.
>>>>> Also i can help with making generic binding of openDBX to squeak by
>>>>> implementing a plugin.
>>>>> But i'm not yet ready to start with it :)
>>>>>
>>>> Sounds good.  Is there anything I can try to learn in the meantime  
>>>> that
>>>> would make me more useful?
>>>>
>>>  Yes, sure. Igor+my have decided to build a new DB plugin for the MS$
>>> platform, so that we perhaps no longer hear complaints about missing  
>>> MS$+DB
>>> support (for the major/open DB vendors) in Squeak. You are invited to  
>>> join
>>> us, we could make use of some input and also help with non-toy DB  
>>> testing
>>> (and whatever you'd like to share or help with).
>>>  This is also an invitation to join the project, for Squeakers who  
>>> asked
>>> for Oracle support on their MS$ platform.
>>>  Send email please.
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