Zeoslib Portal

Hi,

I'm seriously thinking in using Zeos in my next projects or for transforming my older applications. I've however some general questions:

1) The zeos library has been stalled for some time (ie thats the idea I have, it might not be the case). Is there now a roadmap? I understand that this is a voluntary library, but I need to be sure that I won't be using a nice library which won't be ehanced any more.

2) How does zeos lib performs next to dbExpress, bde or other component libraries (eg IBObjects, ...) ?

3) Are there some tutorials available which point out some issues (simelarities/differences) between the 'borland' way and the 'zeos' way?

4) Are there some applications which are built on zeos which we can look at, ...

Thanks

Hi Zifnabe,

The zeoslib project knows some 'developers shortage' for the moment. We hope there will be some people who want to contribute some more in the future.

About the roadmap we can be short. There is no formal roadmap for the future yet, because the main founders of the project are gone, as far as I know. The new main project team counts 3 volunteers : Michael Seeger, Helmut Hartl and myself. This means we are very short staffed.

Our first goal is the release of a stable version containing all changes since version 6.1.5. We just released 6.6.0-beta and now we collect the bugs users encounter. This does not mean this version is really unstable : quite a lot of users is using this version for production use! We hope to have the stable release by the end of the year.

In the meantime development of new features is frozen, but features requested (and sometimes developed) by users are collected, so we will have some inspiration to write the roadmap for the next months/years.

Definitely on the list are :
- Adding prepared statement support for mysql. (Firmos, Helmut's company hosting the project, really needs it in the near future)
- Improved documentation. (Michael is working on this now)

Feature requests can be posted in the dedicated forum.

Concerning performance : It should be better than BDE, but the cost of supporting multiple databases is that we are a little slower than components focusing on 1 specific server. As long as datasets are not too big (say less than 10000 records) nobody complains about speed.

Differences between the Borland and the Zeos way should be as small as possible. Our goal is to have similar functionallity without the hassle of the BDE component on the client machines.

I know the company Firmos (Austria) is using zeoslib for his applications.
There's also 'sqlite administrator' and HeidiSql that I know about. The last one definitely has an open source. For the others I'm not sure sources are publicly available.

Mark

- Adding prepared statement support for mysql. (Firmos, Helmut's company hosting the project, really needs it in the near future)

Is there a list of all supported issues per database? Right now, I'm particulary interested in Firebird and Sybase.

Is there a list of basic supported issues (ie for every database available), eg how are transactions handled, etc

The new main project team counts 3 volunteers

That's a nice main group already. Are these people committed to work on this for a longer time? Ie do they have major benefits in keeping the work going on?

How does Zeos behave next to dbExpress?

Hi,

I don't have this list of supported features. I think Firebird is fairly complete. No idea about sybase.

The only person who has to be commited is Firmos (Helmut Hartl), I think. His firm depends partly on zeoslib stability) For me it's just a hobby. Idon't know for Michael.

Important to know : most work has been done by other people debugging/testing/writing features. I just coordinated the contributions sent by them. I just programmed some minor fixes myself.

Mark

mdaems, thanks for the information.

Other question, not knowing the architect of the library:

What work is needed to have the firebird units prepared for firebird 2.0? Is there work to it?

No idea, but as far as I know firebird 2.0 is already present as a separate protocol. Not knowing Firebird I can not confirm that the newest Firebird features are used by zeoslib. If there are some new 2.0 functions that can offer more performance for the same job that maynot be done yet. If you want to know that, study of the 'plain' Firebird units is a good thing to start with, I think. I don't know if there is much difference between the units for different versions apart from different dll's being called.

Mark

i think i want to try to migrate for zeos.............

Hello,

Speaking of my own experience with Zeos, we began using it 18 months ago. It's now in production (our applications are somewhat of a niche market, so you likely haven't heard of it), and works really fine with decent speed (typical DB size : ~10^6 rows).

However, our database usage is admitedly more of a data storage layer than a full fledged "business oriented model" (or whatever buzzword is used theses days), so it might not be your typical usage. We mainly use non visual components with Firebird (embedded), Oracle and MySQL. I've recently switched to Firebird 2.0, and had no compatibility problems whatsoever.

We recently ran into some cryptic bugs related to Delphi 2006, but it seems Delphi is to blame, not Zeos. So overall it's been a great tool, and definitely suggest you give it a try for your projects.

I use ZeosLib since 3-4 years: Delphi 7/10/BDS06 + MySQL + PostgreSQL. Having 8 offices countrywide, a centralized DB server (Postgresql) with some 300K max rows in a single table I still did not experience any crucial problem using Zeos.

I firmly recommend Zeos for production environment, even 6.6.0beta.

In general, the terms Alpha, Beta, etc. in ZeosLib development (since years) does not make the same sense as other software around. I mean Beta is not really Beta, but say "Gama" or "almost stable" :-)

Plamen