A few days ago we stealthily released the first beta version of zeoslib 7.
The most important improvement you'll find in this version is support for the compilers Delphi2009 and newer, with their unicode strings.
I suppose all of you have seen the impact this change of string behaviour had on zeoslib development.
About 4 years ago our user gto did a first try to adapt our library to the new behaviour by converting the internal string handling to ansistrings. The changes were massive, but even that wasn't enough. Because we don't only handle strings in our databases. BLOBs were also passed through string buffers, making the conversions very tricky. And development came to a halt.
Nine months ago user Egonhugeist took up the gloves. This time we were a little more cautious and we split the development branch giving us (and even more : you) the opportunity to experiment with this new approach instead of starting changes to the main development branch. This time we were more succesful. Apart from the unicode problem he also attacked a few longstanding bugs that we could also apply to the main development branch. Three months ago the testers of the testing-egonhugeist branch unanimous decided the new approach was the way to go in order to get a new stable release soon, that supports the newest compilers (Delphi and FPC).
Other changes in this release are
- Some new components for grouping connections (alpha status)
- Postgres event alerter component comparable with the existing Interbase/Firebird event alerter.
- Pooled connections (alpha status)
- Real prepared statement support (always for firebird, on demand for mysql and postgres), allowing to prepare queries once and execute them multipe times with different input variables.
- New FreeTDS driver for connections to Mssql and Sybase that can replace the old dblib protocol.
- TZStoredproc got a full makeover. Now Stored procedures should work for postgres, firebird, mysql, mssql and oracle (alpha status, work is still ongoing here)
- A load of bugs have been fixed.
From october 1. a feature freeze is in force. This means the zeoslib 7.0 series should not be changed in a way that changes the currently expected behaviour of the components. Allowed (and encouraged) changes are bug fixes, documentation fixes (
), compilare compatibility fixes, aligning behaviour between different databases, ...As development team we're convinced this beta release should be at least as stable as the 6.6 stable series. We hope you massively test and report were we broke compatibility with older versions. Also, let us know where we should improve on support of the newer compilers.
Downloads of the new beta release can be found on sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/zeoslib ... .0.1-beta/ or our mirror download directory http://zeosdownloads.firmos.at/downloads/
Happy testing
The zeoslib development team
Mark, Michael and a lot of more silent testers, fixers, patchers, commentators...
Please report bugs for this version to our brand new bugtracker on sourceforge https://sourceforge.net/p/zeoslib/tickets/.
