Monday, March 25, 2002

I have been spending a lot of time with Flash MX since it was released. To my pleasent surprise, it lives up to at least part of the marketing hype. It is slowing turning into a decent client-side application development environment. And the new and improved object and event model in MX allows a developer to use a much more traditional application design approach. Not near as much voodoo needed to get things to work as in Flash 5. And with the xml support getting a major speed boost, I bet we will be seeing a lot more Flash front-ends for web apps, and hopefully now it will be because it truly is a better way to do it, and not because the designer just wanted to. 7:41:44 AM

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

This has been a great week in the Frontier community and we are only halfway in. Lots of really cool releases happening from all directions (RCS, PostgreSQL, ODBC, TLS Server). So much to digest (with more coming today), I hope everything gets the attention it deserves. The TLS Server from Macrobyte for doing secure communications with Frontier is a big deal. It opens the door for Frontier to be utilized in a whole host of areas where it could not have been without it. But it looks like Macrobyte will be charging for it. Thats fine, and I will buy a copy, but it really needs to be baked into Frontier. These are the kind of things that could continue to justify the cost of a full Frontier license. I am having an absolute blast watching the energy and excitement in the Frontier community right now. As someone who has been a quiet member of the community for a lot of years, it is great to see it continue to grow and continue to find new opportunites and directions to explore. 7:37:01 AM

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Yeah! The new version of the ODBC Extension has been released! The primary change from previous versions is support of OS X. I also fixed some old bugs along the way, too. The ODBC Extension works with Frontier and Radio on Windows, Mac OS 8/9, and Mac OS X. As an example of Radio utilization, this post includes a very simple macro that retrieves a bestseller list from a local MS SQLServer database. It is a simple query that gets the top ten selling books for the previous 7 days. And the query happens at publish time. (The Radio client is OS X and the database is on Win2k Server) Here goes: [Macro error: Invalid Data Source] 12:49:26 PM

Monday, March 11, 2002

Well, it is off to a good start. OpenLink sent me new versions of their OSX ODBC stuff while I was out of town and I installed it and gave it a whirl this afternoon. It worked perfectly! Now all I really have to do is modify some of the init scripts and we are ready to roll tri-platform. Fun fun. 3:41:26 PM

Okay, back in town after a much needed vacation. Hopefully should have the time to work towards a release of the ODBC Extension later this week. On another note. As I have been catching up on my scriptingnews and related blogs, I have been following the hoopla about RCS and the pricepoint. I do not understand why RCS is not just builtin and included with Frontier 8. The Frontier pricepoint seems appropriate for a server app. It would continue to drive sales of Frontier licenses. And it keeps it simple, one product for the client, Radio, and one product for the server, Frontier (whether you wanted to run manila, or rcs). 7:26:33 AM

Monday, March 4, 2002

Cool. Here is my first post. Not quite certain what this site will develop into yet, but will definitely be a playground for integrating my ODBC Extension with Radio. I can see several situations where it would be quite nice to retrieve info from an Oracle or MS SqlServer database at publish time. 10:57:03 AM

© Copyright 2004 Stephen Tallent.