dbQwikSite 6.0 Beta Ready for Testing

dbQwikSite V6 is on the way. As part of the release we are conducting a public Beta test where users can download the pre-release version and provide feedback to the development team about new features.

Anyone who wants to participate as a tester can download V6 BETA from the user forum
There is a thread available to record any issues and chat about new featured.

Official release dates for dbQwikSite production release is not available yet. The release date will depend on the outcome of the Beta test. We are targeting about 1 month for Beta testing.

dbQwikSite V6 is on its way

Without a doubt the single most asked question I hear is: "When is version 6 coming?" The answer too often eludes me. But today I am happy to say... it's on the way.

After going through some staffing changes, version 6 took some hits in terms of both scope and delivery schedule. I have been avoiding answering that most prevalent question because, I just did not want to misguide our loyal user community. Amid all the forum rumors of the lack of delivery of new versions, I did not want to add to the confusion.

Truth be told we have been working on version 6 all along and it is shaping up for a release. Version 6 offers a range of new features that should make dbQwikSite generated web sites more powerful and flexible than ever before. The list is not yet finalized, as we try to squeeze in those last few features before freezing development to begin testing in earnest. V6 focus is on two areas, making pages more powerful for the end user and on design flexibility to allow designers greater control on the look of generated pages.

In the area of more powerful pages, look forward to: multiple categories, in-line edit/update, group actions against multiple selected records, new user controls, and enhanced search capabilities.

In the area of design you can expect to see: custom add/update form support, enhanced CSS classes, customizable HTML sections on all pages.

The above lists are not comprehensive, but should give you an idea of what to expect. As far as delivery dates, these will depend on testing results. Tomorrow is the date set to set the final scope and thus the development target deadline. After that some testing, and finally general release. It's hard to say exactly when these will occur, but stay tuned to this blog for news and updates.

Beyond V6. Many will note that V6 does not include true dot net code generation. That's because we wanted to do that right, and rather than shoehorning dot net functionality into the more classic paradigm of dbQwikSite generated pages, we decided to come out with an all-new version of dbQwikSite for dot net. That in no way infers that we are dropping PHP support. Quite the contrary, we are planning to migrate PHP into the same framework as the dot net product, leveraging a class oriented code generation in both languages. This will open new doors to PHP users, as well as Microsoft platform users who wish to extend and enhance dbQwikSite generated code.

Web Developer Edition Now Available

dbQwikSite Developer Edition is now available for download. Developer Edition makes its debut as part of the release of 5.3. In a nutshell, Developer addition let’s you add your own custom code into your website projects. The concept is simple, but the ramifications are profound. It means that you can now extend and enhance your generated pages. Developer edition opens the door to a realm of possibilities.

I have been pushing for Developer Edition for almost a year now. I knew that I wanted it, I knew that it would be kewel (cool). What I didn’t know was exactly what it meant to web developers and web designers until I started testing it. It was like having my hands untied, or taking the rev limiter off your sports car. Now, I could do things that I had seen on other sites, but were beyond the capabilities of code generation.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the other editions of dbQwikSite, and every time I use them I am grateful that I don’t have to hand code thousands of lines of code. I always amazed what I can do in 10 minutes with this software. But, being the overachiever I am, I always want more! More features, more cool stuff, more flexibility. That’s exactly what I got with dbQwikSite Developer Edition. To date, I had to wait for the developers to have the time to code new features. I know from emails of our users that I am not the only one that wished that we could provide features faster. With Developer Edition, the game changed overnight. The only one that was holding back features was me, not the developers. I wanted graphs, I added graphs! I wanted conditional highlighting, I added conditional highlighting! I wanted a search on the data lists page, I added it! You get the idea, I am sure. It was instant gratification. It was the freedom to do much, much more without giving up all the “cushy” benefits of my beloved code generator.

Here is a copy of the promotional video I made to introduce Developer Edition.
The quality a bit blurry here, there is bigger one on the home page of dbQwikSite

If I have caught your interest, then you likely want to know more about what’s inside the new edition. Developer looks the same as other editions. What’s new is a “In-line code editor”. When you are working with a page, you click the “custom code” option in the popup menus. What you see is the generated source code. Inside the code, there are input boxes we call “insert points” in which you can type your own custom code. There are over 150 of these insert points at key places in the processing. Some are “events” like “after open dataset” and “on focus” of a control. Others do not related directly to an event, but more to places in code where you may want to add your own code, an example is “CSS Includes” it is not an event, but you may wish to include your own CSS files at this point in the source code. As you may have gathered, there are insert points for both client and server side scripting.

Besides the code editor, there are several reports designed specifically for web developer in mind edition such as the custom code report. You don’t need to hunt through each page looking for custom code in your project. Just run this handy report, and you’ll know exactly what custom code you have in your project. Another powerhouse feature is a complete custom code versioning mechanism built right into dbQwikSite. Every time you modify a custom code block, a new version is saved into your project. You can use the Version Management Interactive Report to view a complete history of your custom code blocks. What’s more, you can even “revert” back to previous versions if you discover you somehow messed things up along the way. Behind the scenes there have been some changes to the way pages are generated to allow better control of presentation by JavaScript. Ids are assigned to page elements; the contents of the page are now embedded in layout matrix of divs that let you insert content around generated elements. Variable name abstractions have been added to let you code using variable names that are readable and do not get changed when you do design changes.

If you want to give developer a try, you need the new executable program file. To get the most recent exe new users can download PE and existing users can run live update. All editions let you preview Developer’s entire user interface. If you want to test drive the code generation, just run in Full Trial mode. Upgrade pricing is available to all version 5 users. Details can be found on the web site.

dbQwkSite v5.0 is out!

Life at ThedevShop is hectic as the team is busy releasing dbQwikSite version 5.0. Version 5 is now available. Top of the list of technical enhancements is Windows Vista Support and ASP.net code generation. In what’s new category look for, HTML editor integration, a cool new Web Form Import Wizard, our new “Universal” Database Table Editor, and Project Reporting.

Ok, I know you want all the juicy stuff, but indulge me for a moment while I position TheDevShop’s direction for this release. If I had to say what I wanted for this release in one word it would be “unification”, or at least a good start at it. What I mean by Unification is blurring the lines between all the tasks of involved in web development. I wanted our development team to give you, our users, a tool that is not just “another” code generator, but much more. It should be a tool to build and maintain your database web sites, dbQwikSite should be a tool that unifies common tasks. Version 5 is a step in that direction. It is the only non-enterprise “code generator” that I know which allows you to change just about anything, just about whenever you want, without the whole thing flying apart at the seams. We have worked extra hard on this release with the idea that development is not a linear process, and that we cannot be the best tool for all tasks, but we can be the best place to “pull it all together”.

OK so much with the grandiose vision! Let’s get down to the juicy stuff! I can’t talk about everything in details here, but here are the best “bits”.

Windows Vista: dbQwikSite now runs on Windows Vista. We have tested Business and Enterprise editions. We have had some strange security issues, but then again who has not with Vista? You may need to launch as Administrator on the first execution other than that it all seems to work.

ASP.net: You can now generate ASP.net just as easily as you do ASP and PHP. You can even use your old projects and generate ASPx with no modifications. This release is “Beta”, we have tested all core functions, but a few things are lacking, however we did not want to hold the whole thing back over the remaining issues that should be address shortly. Some other have not been fully tested, shopping gateways, require additional testing, they “should” work, but we won’t know until we test them out fully. Anyone with any troubles, please let us know and we will fix these as quickly as possible.

Web Form Import: This is one of favorites: point dbQwikSite to any web form (PC file or URL) and it analyses the form, creates table based on the form fields and creates a set of dbQwikSite pages. Mind you, the new pages don’t look anything like your original form (maybe in v5.1), but this is cool way to build back-ends to web forms. It is also a way to let web masters design database applications in a way that they understand, using web forms. Sometimes starting from designing a table is not as intuitive as designing a form which is more a visual representation of the data. By the way, experience has shown me that end users understand a form much more readily than a table definition.

Universal Database Table Editor: Now you can change your database tables as you work in dbQwikSite. This is part of my grand vision, in case you actually read the second paragraph. It seems perfectly natural, you’re working building a “web app” and you need a new column or you discover the table identifier needs tweaking. The “Universal” Table editor lets you do just that. You got to ask “Why doesn’t every tool work this way?” The answer is because “it isn’t easy”. If changing a table structure in any database is not hard enough, try making sure your pages that use these tables don’t all go sideways. Hats off to our developers, who managed to make changing database tables as simple as changing HTML tables. dbQwikSite continually analyses your database changes and flags items that have been invalidated because of database changes.

HTML Editor Integration: You can now use your own HTML editor anywhere that you can use our integrated HTML editor. Let’s face it; dbQwikSite would be hard pressed to come up with an internal HTML editor that can compare to Dreamweaver, FrontPage or CoffeCup. Besides, who wants to learn yet another HTML editor if you are comfortable with the one you have. Now you can configure dbQwikSite to either use its built-in editor or launch your editor to edit HTML pages or HTML fragments. Keeping with my grand vision, dbQwikSite goes the extra mile, we don’t just start your HTML editor, we constantly monitor edited files, between sessions just in case you happened to edit a file from your HTML editor “stand-alone” or out-of-sequence. dbQwikSite will flag any page that is out of sync and even guide you through a reconciliation process deciding which changes to keep and which to discard.

Project Reports: “Who needs them?” was the question the developer asked. “Our users do!” is what support replied. What are project reports? They are pretty close to what they sound like. These are reports that give you consolidated information to help you manage and troubleshoot your projects. If you have ever hunted through program dialogs to discover a stay setting, you’ll know what I am talking about. Run a report, and you can survey a wealth of information in one format. We have supply about 5 canned reports. The cools part about reports is not only the fact that you can see information buried in the “guts” of dbQwikSite, but you can actually create your own reports. If you’re an XML techie, you may rise to the challenge. dbQwikSite now stores a copy of your project in XML. You can create report definitions in xsl. Add a little XML report description file to the mix, and “voila” dbQwikSite integrated reports. There as section in help on this topic for you brave soles that want to try creating reports. If you do make something useful, or just “cute” be sure to share, send a copy to us to distribute.

Those are the big enhancements. There are a number of smaller things what we would have loved to have out 3 versions ago, these include:

• A missing image graphic, when record images are not found.
• Check Boxes, yes finally, dbQwikSite can do a check box.
• Smarter Auto page items: now we don’t add a whole set of page items when you redefine your dataset.
• File upload on the Add page.
• Enhanced Consistency checking. Warning you if something in your project may not generate correct code.
• MySQL script for the sample project databases.
• Login page default page targets can now be defined.

That’s about it for this release. We hope it will make developing and maintaining your database web sites a much more enjoyable task. And don’t worry, we are already planning version 5.1 and v6, we have a long future ahead of us. Thank you to all our paid users for your support. To all our PE users, I hope that we by offering more that we can earn your business as a paid user. For those of you who are users yet, what are your waiting for? You’re missing some pretty cool stuff, and besides PE is free!