DataMgr 2.1 is now in beta. Aside from fixing one or two small bugs, nothing has changed from the Alpha release.
It take this as a pretty good sign as I changed a fair bit of the inner workings of DataMgr in order to achieve the new features of 2.1. It has been running on several live sites for a few days now without any problems.
I got a call yesterday from a friend of mine who is just starting to use DataMgr. He asked me how to use the QuerySim feature of DataMgr which made me realize that I had never written a good explanation of how to use it.
In most of our interactions between code and database, one dictates the other. If we are working with a legacy database, then the structure of the database will dictate how we write our code. If we are proceeding from a visual prototype, then our database follows from our design.
I have found that many people set up the primary keys for join tables in a manner that I find undesirable. This leaves open the possibility of some sneaky bugs in their programs.
I'll start by covering what I mean by a join table (as opposed to what I will call a data table).
Most basic data is stored in data tables. For example a "users" table is a data table, as is a "groups" table. Each row in a "users" table represents one user, as each row in a "groups" table would represent a group.
We have been working to enable access to our data via ODBC and/or MS Access - a project more complicated than expected. While we were working on this, I went to cf.Objective.
Among the very good presentations I attended was one called "Test Driven Development" by Paul Kenney. I had attended a few online presentations about TDD before and read a few articles as well. I always came away thinking that I should try that out "some day", but also feeling like I didn't quite grasp the concept fully (I did not grok TDD).
I attended Peter Bell's online presentation on LightWire Wednesday which was put on by cfframeworks.com.
I realize that DataMgr 2.0 hasn't been out long, but I thought of a few features that I wanted near the end of the 2.0 development cycle. Since they required a fair bit of extra effort, I thought it best to hold them over for a "2.1" release.
Although I have been given some good ideas for future versions of DataMgr, the 2.1 version will probably be the last major release for at least a few months - I have some other projects that I want to give some attention.
DataMgr 2.1 is still in alpha, so the feature set may change (unstable features may be removed), but the features in the alpha are:
