Looking forward: The future of the ZeosLib Project.

Post by **Michael** » 14.02.2006, 17:22

Dear ZeosLib users,

we have some very important news for you. For this year we have planned a reorganization of our team- and development-infrastructure.

Fortunately some developers joined the team to force the completion of our current release and at the moment intensive work is going on to bring ZeosLib's DBOs from current 6.5.1 (alpha) towards version 7.0.0 (Codename: "Lemuria"). To achieve this we also changed our development-infrastructure. The sources now are managed by using Subversion as our version control system. The SourceFore CVS will be updated frequently to provide the code to the public. This splitting has just one reason: For the future we want to have "stable" CVS versions for our users.

It is also planned to put version 7.0.0 into a (closed) time-limited beta test. We will announce this in time and all registered forum users are invited to join the beta test group in order to test the new version and give us feedback or post bug reports in a special beta tester forum.

We also decided to change the bug report plattform: All future bugs shall be reported in a special bug report forum as part of the ZeosLib Forum which will be enabled when all changes and preparations are done. For us, this is more flexible than the SF-Bugtracker and you will be able to track the bug reports in our forum.

As you can see: We are going to focus all the communication in our forum. This is more sophisticated than the Sourceforge plattform and more flexible to handle. In the future SourceForge will be only used as public download plattform, including the official builds and the current CVS.

Now one of our biggest problems so far: For now we need more development power. Everyone in the forum could see that. Because of that we decieded to start a "recruitment" in order to strengthen our development team. And what we need are developers that are ready to identify themselves with ZeosLib and seriously interested in ZeosLib development to improve and maintain our product. What we need most at the moment are developers who are able to care about the plain database driver support which is directly connected to the zdbc layer. Furthermore we need reinforcement to do the Lazarus support.

So if you have skills that meet our needs and want to join the ZeosLib development team feel free to contact Michael via pm. You should shortly introduce yourself and tell us your strength and what you are able to do for the project as a member of our development team.

I hope we will receive a lot of serious "applications" so that the future of ZeosLib is more safe. But please be patient it will surely take its time to evaluate.

Best Regards,

Your ZeosLib-Project-Management.

matsgefvert · Post by **matsgefvert** » 15.02.2006, 15:22

Is there any kind of roadmap available? 7.0 sounds like a big step to me.

/ Mats

bee · Post by **bee** » 16.02.2006, 07:06

I'm very glad to know Zeos will have formal and serious support for Lazarus, considering that Delphi is going to be a dead IDE. I believe you all have heard that Borland is selling its development tool division (including Delphi, Kylix, C++BUilder, JBuilder, Turbo Pascal, etc).

In my opinion, Zeos should give better and stronger support for Lazarus/FPC than before. Because if Delphi is dead, then the best alternative IDE/compiler to support is Lazarus/FPC. The combination of great open source object pascal compiler and a great open source database connectivity component, will produces great applications. This step must be prepared from now.

This step is also considered by other Delphi component developers. Lots of them now are modifying their components to be also able to run upon Lazarus/FPC. Indy and FIB are good examples.

I'd like to help the Zeos developer team, but I don't think I have enough knowledge to help on the development. I'm just a happy and lazy user of Zeos, the best thing I can do is bug report.

So, thank you and good luck to Zeos Team.

-Bee-

matsgefvert · Post by **matsgefvert** » 16.02.2006, 10:07

I don't want to start any discussion about this, but I think it's premature to call Delphi a "dead IDE". If you pour over the blogs from within Borland, and many other sources, I think the sale of the IDE's comes across in a different light. The intention as I've understood it is to let Delphi and the other products stand on their own, finally getting the attention they deserve from upper management.

At the very least, let's give it a year or two before we see clearly how things turn out. It's way too early to say if the move is going to be either successful or a mistake.

Anyway, this is not the right forum for a debate, I just wanted to give my two cents before rumors get out of hand.

/ Mats

Post by **Michael** » 16.02.2006, 10:13

@all

matsgefvert wrote:Anyway, this is not the right forum for a debate, I just wanted to give my two cents before rumors get out of hand.

This is correct! Please open a new thread in the Delphi / Object Pascal - Forum ...

:thanks:

snorkel · Post by **snorkel** » 21.02.2006, 23:00

I would love to see Postgresql notification support in 7.x
PostgresDAC has this and it's the only reason I am not using Zeos.
Also a backup/restore component would be nice :-)

snorkel · Post by **snorkel** » 21.02.2006, 23:01

You should really mention this on the Borland Newsgroups.

apiove · Post by **apiove** » 02.03.2006, 09:59

I'want to partecipate to this project.

Who am I:
There are simple way to start to collaborate with you?
I'm not a supercoder:
I've made a simple TDBTreeView (a bit buggy, but working quite fine not released, I'm going to GPL it very soon);
I'm developing an office application for my business using Delphi 7 ZeosDBO and MySQL.

My possible contribute:
I think that I can write some examples and docs.

PS: I would like to have more documentation as possible about the structure of Zeoslib for better understanding the project and the code.

zippo · Post by **zippo** » 27.03.2006, 22:42

Pleas, PLEASE, make it as possible similar to 6.5.x, s there will be an easier transition.

TonyG · Post by **TonyG** » 08.04.2006, 10:54

Dear ZeosLib Team.

First of all 'we' (I think that all the members think the same as me) want to thank you for your great work.

Second, could you tell us how the work is going on?
- D2006 packages
- MySql 5.x support
- and more ..

Sorry for my bad english.

Thanks a lot.

DavidVTaylor · Post by **DavidVTaylor** » 15.04.2006, 04:24

Michael,

I posted a PM to you some time ago about contributing to Zeos but have received no reply. Anything happening with Zeos recently?

David

Post by **mdaems** » 15.04.2006, 19:44

David,

Michael and Helmut (Firmos) don't really have that much time at the moment they say. They are still trying to support us, however.

Some days ago, I got update rights to a brand new branch 'testing' in the SVN repository. I started adding some small patches sent by other users yesterday evening.
I propose people do sent patches to this branch to the 'user patches' forum. The people obtaining update rights should try to evaluate and eventually integrate this patches in the testing branch. Communications/polls/... should happen in the tread sending the patch. A thread should be closed by a message announcing integration/refusal/... of the patch.

The 'conditions':
- Please work with the fully updated testing branch if you want to contribute patches.
- Send the patches in an TortoiseSvn compatible (unified) diff format.
- Test this code reasonably on your patform before submitting. At least the included test projects should not give more Failures than before.
- If you can add some tests to the test suite to avoid your patch to be broken again lateron, please feel free to do so.
- Have some patience, please... At the moment I'm the only one who has update rights (apart from Helmut and Michael).

Mark

DavidVTaylor · Post by **DavidVTaylor** » 17.04.2006, 03:05

Mark,

Thanks for the update. What is the URL for the new SVN repository? I saw mention that development has moved to SVN but don't recall seeing a URL posted. Is this a new SourceForge SVN repository or located somewhere else?

I would also be interested in understanding the longterm goals and plans for Zeos. I for one would like to see some enhancements, especially to Firebird support. I am willing to help out adding Firebird 2.0 support as well as better support for FB in embedded mode. There is also a design problem/bug that caused me problems working with Instant Objects that I would like to correct. I commented on this in one of the threads on this forum and am willing to help develop a solution if there is interest.

Thanks,
David

sandeep_c24 · Post by **sandeep_c24** » 17.04.2006, 05:13

I think more developers are need to develop this. I think Zeos is a great lib to work with Delphi and any database. For some reaso I don't understand why there are no developers coming forward to help. I wish more developers could join this team before exsting developers lose interest and move on.

Sandeep

Post by **mdaems** » 17.04.2006, 19:04

For all those who want to join our team (and we really need you all):
The 'production' SVN directory is on the following address :
[url]svn://firmos.at/zeos/trunk[/url]
BUT : there are some problems with this version. Lazarus compiling is broken.
The development branch I'm trying to 'maintain' for the moment is here:
[url]svn://firmos.at/zeos/branches/testing[/url]

Mark

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Looking forward: The future of the ZeosLib Project.

Looking forward: The future of the ZeosLib Project.

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