April 13, 2001

Blog and DBISAM

Well, either the Scope 1.0 release must be really working well or nobody has noticed it yet <vbg> I haven’t heard anything from anybody and I guess that must be a good sign :p Anyway, yesterday I came to a decision as to my further coding efforts since Scope is kind of at a milestone point … I decided to do a complete rewrite of Blog before I did any further work on Scope 🙂

My decision was mainly due to the fact that I’d been really bothered by the huge size of the Blog distribution and really wanted to trim it down to a manageable size … I was even tempted to go ahead and buy Delphi Enterprise on EBay for around $400 just for the ADOExpress components (and I couldn’t really afford to do that but what can I say? I’m kind of impulsive and driven :p) Then I looked around at several BDE alternatives and finally settled on a freeware alternative which was actually for Delphi 3.0 but since the source was provided, I decided to do some massive rewriting and come up with a solution of my own …

But that was before I discovered what I discovered today 🙂 It all started with me finding a freeware CVS app named FreeVCS while looking around for some Delphi stuff… I discovered that FreeVCS was extremely light (only about 200k) and that it was multi-user! So I did some more digging since I knew that FreeVCS used some sort of database format and that the source code was available … It was then that I came to know of DBISAM. It’s not free and I think the cheapest it sells for is around $225 for an Academic License but it does everything I could want from a BDE replacement that I’d want for Blog! It’s multi-user so that I Blog can actually have shared journals if necessary, it’s very, very compact and it has utilities to convert existing BDE databases! Now only if it didn’t cost so much money, it would be perfect <vbg>

I did decide to see if the people at ElevateSoft were in a generous mood and asked them whether I could have a complimentary copy or at least a lower priced version of the software since all my development is freeware. I hope they do say yes because I am not making any money out of any of my coding and while it would be great to have Blog be really spiffy with the power and versatility that DBISAM provide, I don’t think I can afford to buy another item of software at the moment … Oh well … I guess we shall see …

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Posted by Fahim at 10:25 am  |  No Comments