dbQwikSite Version 6 Released

All new major release of dbQwikSite website designer and code generator is now available for download.
This new release includes many enhancements with special emphasis on generating websites that offer richer user experiences.

IDE Enhancements:

Live Preview Highly integrated design and testing. See your pages live as you design them. Live preview embeds a browser into dbQwikSite, so you can see not only how your pages look, but how they work as well. Live preview also interprets all your custom code so features implemented in custom code and via plugins are visible. Test and design at the same time.

Build more Powerful Pages:

Active plug-ins Active plug-ins are a whole new type of plug-in for dbQwikSite. Technically speaking these plug-ins are intelligent “auto snippets”. What they do is offer little bits of functionality to add to your pages. Many of the V6 new features are, in fact, active plug-ins.

Multiple Categories Category filtering has been one of our most popular features allowing your visitors to get lists filtered by a category. Now, we’ve gone one better, multiple categories. Filter by category then sub-category, and sub-sub-category and so on, all with never leaving the data list page.

Group Actions on List Page Ever want to make a page where users can tick, tick, tick several items and perform an action against the selected items? Now you can. Use standard actions, such as delete, or update a field or write your own actions in developer edition. Supercharge your repetitive action tasks with Group Actions.

In-line Add/Update/Delete Want to let your users work with records of their list page without navigating in and out add/update pages? In-line delete has now two new friends, in-line add and in-line update. Add and update forms can now be presented as pop-up dialogs rather than separate pages, to make working off the list page easier than ever.

Unbound Forms Do you have the need to collect information from your site using HTML forms, but you really do not need to store it in a database? New Unbound forms let you design forms that email you the user input rather than storing in a database table. It’s a fast way to create simple web forms.

Email Added / Edited Records Do you need to know when a new record is added or updated in your database? Now you can have dbQwikSite forms automatically send you a copy of the updates that take place on your web site.

Capcha Stop those pesky hackers and robots from submitting your forms, add Captcha to your forms. Capcha is the system where graphics are displayed, containing letters to type in before a form can be submitted..

Autocomplete Create input controls that look up values from your database as you type, allowing users to find existing values without scrolling trough long drop down lists. Unlike drop down lists, auto complete allow users to enter their own values when the value they seek is not already in the database.

RTF Editor You can now turn any text box control into an advanced RTF editor. Users can create formatted text to be stored and displayed from your database.

Quick Search Add s simple search right to your data list pages. Visitors can pick a field and filter by a value without needing to go to the search page.

Multiple Value Search Need to search for a shirt that is either red or blue or black? V6 now offers the ability to search for multiple search values in a single database column.

PDF Print via Online services Do your visitors ask for PDF copies of the pages they see on your site? Now you can simply add a Print PDF button to any page which sends that page to a free PDF document creation service.


XML and JSON Services. Now you can turn any dbQwikSite data page into a web service serving either XML or JSON data streams. There’s nothing to do other than call your page with a special URL parameter: return=XML or return=JSON.

Build Pages with More Pizzazz:

Custom Form Layouts Full support for custom layouts of Add and Update pages. Create professional looking form designs placing input field prompts and input field controls where ever you want them, add in borders and any HTML formatting and your forms will impress.

HTML Zones let’s you add “stuff”Add HTML “stuff” into more places on your page. We’ve exposed the layout “quadrants” found in developer edition to all editions. Previously, you could customize page headers and footers, as HTML segments. Now you have the same functionality for 10 separate zones arranged around the dbQwikSite generated content in a North, East, South, and West fashion.


Conditional Formatting Ever think that you’d like to change the format of data on your page based on the value of that data. For example show negative numbers in red, or bold any string that starts with “New “. Conditional formatting lets you do just that. You can control all CSS attributes of a data field based on the value contained in that field

Google Charts Who doesn’t like looking at graphs to visual their data? Whether it’s monthly sales or average rainfall, graphs inherently make numerical data easier to understand. dbQwikSite now seamlessly integrates to Google’s free (conditions apply) web service for creating graphs. No coding required, just pick the columns to graph and dbQwikSite does the rest.

Google & Live Maps Add maps to your web sites, with ease. Give point of a field in your data that is an address or a longitude / Latitude pair and add the power of interactive maps to your page.

Improved CSS dbQwikSite is great at making pages, hundreds of them a minute, all following the same formatting. Now you can gain greater control over the look of your pages, with new, more granular classes. Make your generated pages a truer reflection of your personal creativity.

Item level CSS controlEvery page item now lets you assign your own inline CSS attributes on both the caption and the data values. Now you can make certain fields stand out, and other fade out. Any CSS attributes are available down to the finest level of your page design.

Scrollable Data Areas Do wide tables and lots of data rows ruin your page, making it run off your monitor? Now you can easily constrain your tables into scrollable data areas, helping preserve the appearance of the your page design.

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.

dbQwikSite 5.4 Makes it a Joy to Deploy

Oh Boy… another deploy!  This is what I always feel before trying to move a dbQwikSite database web site to a hosting server.  I’ve got to worry about file folders, file transfers, connection strings, data base installs, file permissions and none of it is as easy as I would like it to be. 

I’m not the only one that does not look forward to sorting out all the differences between my perfect PC test and some distant server looming out there in cyberspace.  Users have been asking for help deploying for quite some time now.  That time has arrived with the release of dbQwikSite version 5.4.  They say necessity is the mother of invention, I say laziness is a close second.  I therefore confess that my laziness is the driving force behind this most recent release.  “Just make it easy for me.” was the mandate I gave to the development team.  And about 6 weeks later I am happy to report that I can be lazy as I like and STILL get my site to deploy!

So what magic do we get in this version?  The Highlights are:  a new, smarter deploy wizard, a better more robust FTP, and on-line administrative pages.  The new deploy wizard now is smarter a producing working connection strings for your host.   The all new folder based file selection for deployment is a breeze to use.  Say “bye-bye” to dbQwikFTP, I doubt too many users will shed a tear over that.  Say “hello” to FileZilla (free open source) file transfer tool.   Simply put, it just works better than the now depreciated dbQwikFTP.  Smooth integration between the Deploy Wizard and FileZilla makes short work of file transfer; all I have to do is click the start the queue button and all my preselected folders are moved to the right place on my server.  A cool feature at the end of deploy, let’s me launch my site in my browser for easy testing.  One option is to launch the all new dbQwikSite “Site Admin” console.  Arriving in the console, I can install MySQL tables if I had generated the scripts, I can see what scripting languages are supported on my server, I can troubleshoot connection strings.   Neat, I think I like being lazy!  This version make it much more of “a joy to deploy” my sites.

 While the team worked hard to make sure I could be a real sloth, not every deployment task can be automated.  So to accompany all this new software wizardry is the infamous “missing deployment guide”.  It’s not missing anymore!  You can access the new on-line deployment guide from the either the “Help” or “dbQwikHosting” menus. 

There are other new features in 5.4 along with the regular batch of bug fixes.  Details can be found in the release notes.  Version 5.4 is a free upgrade for all version 5 users and is available via live-update.

Mashing it up with dbQwikSite

What is a Mashup? For me it conjures up images of a bunch of cooks, all mashing away at a pot of boiled potatoes. But in the world of web development it means piecing together discreet units of available web functionality into a single integrated application.

Wikipedia defines a mash up as:

Mashup (web application hybrid)
In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Before I say anything more let me show you are screen shot of something I was playing with in dbQwikSite before I looked up the term in Wikipedia.

What you are looking at is a dbQwikSite page that I have in our Real Estate test project in which I added a Windows® Live Map. I had created, almost verbatim, the Wikipedia definition of a MashUp. The listing data is all in the dbQwikSite Real Estate database, but the Map is pulled in from Microsoft. After copying sample code from the Live Maps interactive SDK and fiddling with the custom code a bit, miracles of miracles I made a MashUp in about 15 minutes.

Well that’s not all, check this out. I made this over two months ago, when I was testing Developer Edition. This page uses Google Charts APIs to produce graphs of a data page generated by dbQwikSite.

Here’s another graph… ok, so it’s not a “true” MashUp by definitions. It is using Microsoft’s Siverlight 2 technology which is not a web service, but I didn’t have to know anything about coding graphs, just enough to call the JavaScripts and pass the right parameters. It’s just so pretty, I could not resist showing it off.

So today, it dawned on me, I was creating MashUps and I didn’t even know it. At first I said to myself “Naw, it can’t be that easy, MashUps are the realm of web gurus. I must be missing something.” So off to Wikipedia I went, to delve into the real meaning of MashUps. I stopped reading after I read the example I quoted earlier. “Wow! This is cool!” I thought to myself. There’s something big going on here, code generation plus MashUps what an awesome, powerful combination.

By themselves these web services like Google Charts and Windows Maps are interesting. But they only become valuable when placed within a meaningful context. Let’s face it you are much more interested in a map to the new house you are going to buy than just “a map”. And you are likely much more interested in a plot of your sales than a graph of data that is not yours.

What MashUp developers do is take all these nice “gadgets” and knit them into an application to enhance their applications. These guys are the guys writing the back end processing, digging data out of their databases and integrating these fantastic web services to enrich their web applications. But, wait a minute; dbQwikSite users know that they don’t have to code the back end. The code generator of dbQwikSite does that for you. So we just made the job of creating MashUp web sites magnitudes easier. Let dbQwikSite churn out the back end code and a basic interface then add a few lines of custom code to call web services and we are making MashUps in the blink of an eye.

While I still think that MashUp is a funny term, I do agree that the concept is valid and very powerful. Even more powerful is when you marry that technology to the dbQwikSite code generation technology to web services technology in MashUps. You can produce some pretty advanced websites at lighting speeds by “Mashing it Up” with dbQwikSite.