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Tags Showing all blog entries tagged with "Update"

Product Status Updates for April 2018
Posted by Tim Young on Tue, Apr 10 2018

Things have been very quiet around here lately, so I thought I would update everyone on the status of Elevate Web Builder, ElevateDB, and DBISAM, as well as give more information on some general changes occuring here at Elevate Software.

Elevate Web Builder 3

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Elevate Web Builder 2.07 (more information here: Progress Update on Elevate Web Builder 2.07 has now become Elevate Web Builder 3, due to the sheer number of features being added. However, once Elevate Web Builder 3 is released, it will not be a major release upgrade and only require that you have an active Elevate Web Builder subscription (I will be blogging about the upcoming changes to our support policy in conjunction with subscriptions soon). Since switching to a subscription model several years ago, we have been avoiding doing any major releases due to the fact that our internal systems need some changes to accomodate major version upgrades being included with subscriptions. But, we have now fixed those issues and will be doing more major upgrades going forward.

Work is progressing nicely on Elevate Web Builder 3 and is starting to hit the "downhill" phase of the project where things are rapidly coming together. Hopefully, it won't be much longer than the end of April or beginning of May when we can release a public beta. At this point, the quality of the beta looks like it may be more alpha than beta, but most of the rough edges will be missing features in the run-time for the server-side applications, and those features will be filled in pretty quickly during the beta. I apologize for all of the delays so far, but there have been several unforeseen issues that have extended the development time quite a bit. In particular, the IDE re-write took a few months and was not originally planned at all, but was necessary in order to get the IDE in a position to be able to support multi-mode (client and server) development.

ElevateDB 2.28

ElevateDB 2.28 is now in public beta and should be released in the next week. ElevateDB 2.28 includes the following breaking changes and features:

2.28 Breaking Changes

The following are breaking changes in 2.28:
  • Large file support is now enabled by default in ElevateDB. Along with this change, the TEDBEngine LargeFileSupport and TEDBSession LocalLargeFileSupport properties have been removed.

    Information These are published properties, so please be sure to open, ignore any warnings about these properties being absent, and re-save any forms or data modules that use the TEDBEngine or TEDBSession components to ensure that you do not see any runtime component persistence errors in your application(s).


  • The TEDBEngine ExclusiveFileAccess property has been removed and replaced with the TEDBEngine BufferedFileIO property. Please see the new features in 2.28 section below for more information on the new buffered file I/O functionality in ElevateDB.
2.28 New Features

The following are the new features in 2.28:
  • ElevateDB now includes new global buffered file I/O functionality. There are new TEDBEngine BufferedFileIO, BufferedFileIOSettings, and BufferedFileIOFlushInterval properties for configuring the buffered file I/O in the engine. Please see the Buffering and Caching topic in the SQL manual for more information.


  • ElevateDB now includes new SQL statement and function/procedure caching functionality. There are new TEDBSession SQLStmtCacheSize and FuncProcCacheSize properties for configuring the caching, as well as the TEDBSession FreeCachedSQLStmts and FreeCachedFuncProcs methods for freeing cached SQL statements and functions/procedures. Please see the Buffering and Caching topic in the SQL manual for more information.


  • There are two new system information tables, the FileIOStatistics table, and the SessionStatistics Table table.
Taking Advantage of the New Features

The new buffered file I/O and SQL statement/function/procedure caching are pretty significant improvements to the engine and can increase performance by up to 50% or more, depending upon the workload and how the client applications use the ElevateDB Server. These are attributes that will determine how well these improvements work for you:
  • If your databases are particularly large and routinely contain table files that are in excess of 25-30GB of data, then the new buffered file I/O can improve performance by up to 10-20% over the existing model by allowing you to more accurately fine-tune the way that I/O is performed by ElevateDB and, consequently, the way that ElevateDB interacts with the operating system and disk hardware.


  • If your application uses a lot of triggers and/or executes a lot of duplicate SQL statements, then the new SQL statement and function/procedure caching can improve performance by up to 30-40% by eliminating a lot of the overhead from SQL statement/function/procedure preparation. This is especially true with client applications that use session/statement pooling where SQL statements/functions/procedures cannot be manually prepared and cached by the client application for multiple executions.
Going forward with ElevateDB, our main areas of effort will be in finishing the OS ports for Linux, Mac, Android, and iOS, as well as other lesser features like nested transactions and support for AES encryption. We are also still working on a single-file format for ElevateDB, and hope to have something available by the start of 2019. In addition, the ElevateDB Manager will be getting a facelift to match the UI of the Elevate Web Builder 3 IDE.

DBISAM

DBISAM hasn't been getting much attention lately, and we will be rectifying this after Elevate Web Builder 3 is released. Later on in the year, we will be doing a thorough facelift on DBISAM to bring it up-to-date in terms of its UI, help management, and more. In terms of core improvements, our main goal is to get Unicode field support into the product and improve some core functionality, such as the socket handling, in order to bring it more in line with ElevateDB and Elevate Web Builder 3.

Tags: Elevate Web Builder, ElevateDB, DBISAM, Status UpdatePermanent Link8 Comments

Progress Update on Elevate Web Builder 2.07
Posted by Tim Young on Mon, Nov 27 2017

I just wanted to take some time to update everyone on the (now) very-late 2.07 update to Elevate Web Builder and solicit some comments on potential areas of improvement in the IDE. I also figured that I would do this in a proper blog post, primarily because I don't blog enough about what's going on here at Elevate Software and this is an effort to change that. Smile

To recap, Elevate Web Builder 2.07 will be quite a big update for a minor release. In fact, it's essentialy a major release crammed into a minor release. The list of improvements include:
  • The IDE has been given a facelift and looks quite a bit different in several ways. Part of this is due to the need of starting the process of making the IDE high-DPI aware, and the other part is the need to improve the look and feel of the IDE, especially in terms of negative space and ease-of-use. The new IDE tries very hard to make sure that what one needs is only a single click or keystroke away, whether it be recent projects or saving debug messages to a text file.


  • The web server has also been given a facelift, in addition to several other major improvements listed below. There isn't a user interface for the web server anymore, and instead all administration is performed through the IDE or via a web interface. You can still run the web server as an interactive console process for development purposes, but it is primarily designed now to run exclusively as a service without a user interface.


  • The web server now includes built-in SSL support. The first platform supported will be Windows, of course, so I have implemented the SSL support using the Windows crypto API. This will make things easier to deal with in terms of Windows security updates and improvements, and allow administrators to control how the web server works in terms of which crypto cipher suites are used, as well as which base versions of SSL/TLS are used. And all of this can occur without the developer needing to configure anything in the web server itself, making deployments much easier. Other future platform targets will use the OpenSSL libraries.


  • The web server now includes built-in GZip support. This will greatly improve the Elevate Web Builder client application loading performance over slow connections (mobile), especially when updates to the client applications are deployed.


  • The web server now includes support for loading and executing server-side applications that use the Elevate Web Builder runtime. The runtime is an interpreted Object Pascal execution environment that has been present in the IDE since Elevate Web Builder 2.00, but has only been used for design-time execution of code. It has been updated to include functionality for working with web server requests, files, HTML, and more. What this means is that 2.07 will allow you to create and deploy server-side applications in much the same way that you do now for client applications that run in a browser.


  • The IDE now includes support for creating server-side applications that use the Elevate Web Builder runtime available in the web server. The server-side applications are monolitic and self-contained, so there are no dependency issues. The server-side applications are also compressed, and can be encrypted in order to keep the code secure.
At this point, I'm hoping that we can get a public beta out before Christmas. However, in the meantime, I need some input from everyone on any minor changes that they want to see in the IDE that aren't there currently. What I mean by "minor" are features that are useful for productivity or usability and are mostly cosmetic. Features like code completion or other related code editor features rely on incremental compilation improvements to the Elevate Web Builder compiler, and will be coming next in the compilation improvements to the Elevate Web Builder compiler. So, those types of features are not what I'm looking for. For example, a component navigator was added to the IDE for 2.07 that allows you to see the designer components in a treeview on the left. The component palette was also changed so that it shows the name of the component in addition to the component icon. Things along those lines are what I'm looking for, especially if it deals with improving the productivity or usability of the IDE.

Thanks very much for your feedback.


Tags: Elevate Web Builder, 2.07 Progress Update, Server-Side ApplicationsPermanent Link37 Comments

Product Status Updates and Development Notes
Posted by Tim Young on Mon, Apr 20 2015

Just a quick status update on all of our products, and some notes to address various issues:
  • XE8 support is coming soon, probably this week or next.


  • If you have a support issue (not a question, such as "How do I....?") for EDB or DBISAM, please contact us at support@elevatesoft.com directly. As great as the peer help is on the support forums, it's not fair to those helping out since they're providing their time free-of-charge. I consistently see issues being posted on the support forums from customers that I know have a number of grandfathered support sessions. If you have support sessions, please use them. If you don't, then I don't think that $19 for a support session is going to be a burden for most developers.

    To find out if you have support sessions available, please visit this area of the web site:

    Support Sessions

    (you must be logged in)

    If you're unsure about whether to contact us directly or not, go ahead and contact us directly and simply ask if the issue is appropriate for the support forums, or whether it is something that requires a support session.


  • I know that I've been scarce on the EDB/DBISAM support forums, and that EDB/DBISAM haven't been getting much attention over the past year. This is, unfortunately, the case when I'm heavy in development on a different product (EWB 2). Due to the fact that we're short on developers here, major product revisions have to be done in a serial fashion, so while I'm working on a new EDB revision, EWB won't be seeing many major improvements, or vice-versa. I know that it must be frustrating to see so much attention given to EWB when you're not an EWB user, but EWB is an important part of our future since it has the potential to make the company much stronger. So, indirectly, this type of development means more resources for adding improvements to the other products. Be sure to check out EWB 2 when it's released next week. It's pretty cool and works well with both EDB and DBISAM.

    EDB 2.x is finally going to see some major improvements coming up in early summer. Most notably, Mac support, nested transactions, and a web administration interface. I've also started work on a profiler/tracing layer for the EDB Server, which is really cool because you can see everything that goes on in the EDB Server, including how long it takes to execute every SQL statement, etc.

    EDB 3, while it's been stalled for a while, is still on the map. It will be a departure from EDB 2.x in several ways, though, which is why a) it's been stalled and b) I'll be doing a round of improvements (noted above) before continuing on with EDB 3 this summer.

    DBISAM has been in "legacy" mode for some time now. We'll continue to release new updates for new Delphi compilers, and try adding little improvements where they can be added. Internally, we still use DBISAM and now have it replicating data back and forth between here and our Chicago web server. If you're interested in this type of functionality for DBISAM, let me know and I'll consider publishing it as part of the product. It's completely fail-safe, and maintains transaction boundaries while replicating.


  • I cannot stress enough how important it is to us that everyone has been keeping up with their subscriptions. It is not only greatly appreciated, it is vital to keeping revenue coming in. If you haven't renewed your product subscription lately, then please re-consider doing so. If you have an issue with your subscription, then please let us know and we'll be happy to help you out in any way that we can.


Tags: Update, Support, Support SessionsPermanent Link0 Comments

Elevate Web Builder Status Update
Posted by Tim Young on Thu, Dec 15 2011

The latest scheduled release date was December 15th, but unfortunately we're going to miss the release date again. At this point, I'm not going to be posting any more scheduled release dates until the product is completed. In general, circumstances have not been very cooperative this fall, especially with our internal systems. We've had to cope with a server hard drive crash (again), having to put in a new replacement server, a router failure, a power supply failure on our order processing server, and had to re-work our entire build systems for the Delphi XE2 releases. All of this has killed at least a month and a half of work that was supposed to be used finishing up Elevate Web Builder and moving on from there.

Please check in here periodically to see any updates on the product release, and thank you for your patience.

Tags: Elevate Web Builder, UpdatePermanent Link4 Comments


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