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It’s been a little while since I wrote about the release of SQLEditor so it’s time to write about what’s been happening with SQLEditor since then.

SQLEditor 1.4.1.b2 (available now)

There is a new bug fix release of SQLEditor available in beta right now. If the “Check for beta versions” box in the preferences window is checked then you’ll get the offer of the upgrade to 1.4.1b2.

This is a minor bug fix release that fixes a few bugs that have been reported since the 1.4 release

SQLEditor 1.4.1b3 (available soon)

This release is going to fix a stupid bug that makes the file type selection in the export as image box not work correctly. The file types got mixed up in the code so the labels don’t match the output. It missed the b2 release, but it will be corrected in beta 3

SQLEditor 1.5

This is the next big release of SQLEditor. It’s going to have an entirely new SQL parser (written in ANTLR 3) and a major rewrite of the codebase (which moves almost all of the Java code to C or Objective C)

The new parser replaces to the old Java based parser (written in Javacc) with a new one that runs entirely in C and Objective C. Although I have found JavaCC to be an excellent tool, this replacement reduces the amount of Java code in the application substantially.

Plugins

The new code will also offer a much better api for plugins. The current api, which isn’t public, is used for the Rails import and export, but it’s annoying to work with, because the architecture wasn’t really built for it. The new codebase is much better for writing plugins.

JDBC / JNI Library for Cocoa

SQLEditor 1.5 also uses a new Java JNI and JDBC library for Cocoa which I’m hoping to be able to make Open Source soon. It allows you to access a database using JDBC rather than ODBC. This may not be as efficient, but it’s much easier to install drivers. If you would like to try these new libraries in your own application please send me an email and I’ll send you some code to try out. The final libraries are probably going to be BSD licensed, but it’s still being worked out exactly how it will work.

In case you missed it version 1.4 of SQLEditor was released back on July 8th.

If you’re using 1.3.9 you might like to consider upgrading.

The 1.3.9 upgrade system will be set soon to recommend this upgrade
(though 1.3.9 doesn’t use sparkle, so it can’t actually do the upgrade for you)

SQLEditor 1.4
(3.6 MB DMG File)

Lots of great new features and various bug fixes and improvements to the existing ones.

SQLEditor 1.4b26 is now available for download.

It fixes only one problem which is related to auto increment and SQLite.

This should hopefully be the final beta version for 1.4

The next version should be the 1.4 final release which will probably happen later this week or early next week (assuming no more problems are reported)

SQLEditor 1.4b26 Download [3.6MB DMG]

SQLEditor 1.5 is making good progress. The latest thing that I’m currently working on is to extract SQL Views from a database. In theory this should be just like extracting tables, but it’s looking much harder to work out than I ever expected.

The new SQL parser is mostly finished. It’s been completely rewritten using ANTLR3. This offers a number of really good improvements, the most important one being that it’s not running in Java anymore. The parser is now completely native code.

Also pretty much finished is the new document model code, the new document export code and the new JDBC handling code. I’m hopeful that it will now be possible to run JDBC drivers that use AWT (which I’m informed the IBM DB2 driver may do).

SQLEditor 1.4 is just about finished too. There is one change that needs to get beta tested and then the 1.4 final release should be available.

Watch out for a new 1.5 download soon and of course the final candidate for 1.4

At the moment I believe that both SQLEditor and HTMLValidator are compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and should work without functional difficulty.

A minor issue that I found is that the toolbar icons don’t look very good against the 10.5 window style. These have already been redrawn and the new icons will appear in the 1.4 release.

This assumes that there weren’t any major changes between the version that I used to test and the release version of 10.5 which will be released on October 26th.

Overall it looks good though.

OneMonthApp is using SQLEditor!

OneMonthApp is a project where they are building a complete web application in a month. It’s going to be a simple and easy to use cash flow application, apparently. And they’re going to make it free, which is great too.
I’ve signed up to be notified when it’s done, which the counter is promising for sometime in the next couple of days. (They started in September, so less than a month)
Stephen over at OneMonthApp very kindly included SQLEditor in a list of 20 tools for web application development that they’re using for the project.
Maybe I need an “I use SQLEditor” badge icon or something?

Another day, another beta. (Kind of)

SQLEditor 1.4b2 is now available, which is pretty much bug fixing against 1.4b1.

There were several issues with 1.4b1 including an annoying bug that would sometimes delete foreign key connectors when you deleted an unrelated table.

There are some fixes for other bugs which turned up and some improvements to undo/redo, to make it more stable when you undo or redo lots of things, one after the other.

I’ve also moved SQLEditor to Sparkle. Sparkle replaces an update system that I wrote myself and it should offer better update support as well as a nice html based ‘what’s changed’ window.

SQLEditor also now tells people that it is a beta and exactly when it will expire. It probably should always have done this, but it does it now, which is probably good.

There are also some minor fixes to the live source view, so that it changes with the document sql dialect and appears correctly when reopening existing documents.

[Download] (3.4MB DMG File, changelog)

So, if you’ve visited the MalcolmHardie.com site today you’ll have seen the new site design.

It’s Blue.

But that’s not all. The layout structure of each page has been substantially changed (for the first time since 2004, I think)
. The new 2 column design is also wider (960px) and offers more flexibility than the old 3 column design. There are new graphics and section headings and a new about page (with a message from me!).
The MalcolmHardie logo has been used in a reversed white on blue form, which I think worked out quite well and the main body is black/dark gray 13px Lucida Grande on a white background. (With Verdana as the second choice)

The content management has also been improved. The whole site is now a sort of wiki. Although it is somewhat static as wikis go. Each web page is now a wiki page that is rendered when necessary to deliver the page. Page expiry dates match the wiki source document expiry and all of the meta-data is cached into a database so that things like recently changed lists can be generated. The next iteration of the system may also cache the text as well.

Apache is configured to serve the wiki pages only after any existing index pages, so the whole thing can be switched to static html without recoding (if necessary).

There were several things that I really wanted to do with the re-design.

The first, obviously, was to get the web2.0 thing going. The first step in the design process was therefore to identify the gradient that I wanted to use. The blue/blue gradient seemed to be a good choice here. Although I didn’t in the end go for reflection or glass effects, several prototypes had glass effects.

The second was to serve html pages as html pages with a .html extension. Which was achieved (mostly)

The third thing was to clean up the arrangement of the site, previously there had been a mix of systems used to generate content from an interesting (but probably obsolete) attempt at a php visual class library, through ordinary php to finally plain html. The new wiki style system is consistent across the site. (I’m hoping that this will last)

Software

The site is written in php and uses a mysql database (standard, boring even!)

I used the PEAR Text_Wiki classes to handle the wiki side of things.

The wiki dialect is Text_Wiki default with extra classes to do php includes and page meta data in the same document.

Things I hope to improve

At the moment there are some limitations to the wiki syntax. This means there are more blocks of raw php and html than I want. Eventually I hope to write some more wiki plugins to reduce this

Another area that could be improved is the concept of relative pages within the site. Currently the wiki links are hierarchical with the full link required each time.

I’m very interested to know if you like the new design. Feel free to send me email or add a comment below.

HTMLValidator 1.0 is finally released.

As I write this, it’s been out since Friday, so I guess I’m a bit late in writing this. HTMLValidator 1.0 is identical to HTMLValidator 1.0b8, except of course that it 1) doesn’t expire and 2) asks for registration.

The first non-beta release seems to have gone reasonably well. People are downloading it, trying it and some are starting to buy it. (If you’re reading this, then thank you!).

Oddly enough the most difficult thing about the whole thing was making sure that the order processing system could correctly deal with more than one product. We have a system that interfaces with our payment provider and it handles logging orders and generating serial codes. When it was originally written, HTMLValidator didn’t exist, we sold only one product and there wasn’t really a plan to develop others; So there were several areas that assumed that was only one product. The lesson here is to assume that you’re going to expand and plan accordingly.

Work has already started on the next release of HTMLValidator. The main areas for improvement are speed and memory usage. Plus there are some improvements to validation that the W3C released in their version 0.80 code release that would be nice to have in HTMLValidator. (Which is of course based on the W3C validator).

If you want to try HTMLValidator then we have a page that tells you all about it.

[HTMLValidator]

A new version of HTMLValidator today. I moved the validation into a separate thread to improve responsiveness. This is also the way that HTMLValidator will be doing multiple page validation. In fact the new release even includes pretty much all of the code necessary to do this, but it doesn’t include the interface yet. The 1.0b3 release actually validates a list of urls, but the list contains only 1 element. The idea is to test that the basic code works as expected before bolting the interface on the top.

Also new is a little spinner that spins when the application is doing something, some improvements to error display and handling and a few other fixes here and there. The changelog gives a complete list.

Next feature is the multiple file validation interface and then probably a 1.0 release.