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!

dbQwikSite Updates Released

dbQwikSite 4.2.5.0 has been released. This is a minor update that addresses some timing issues that result in errors being raised unnecessarily. If you have been experiencing error messages lately, an update is recommended.

In other news, we are working hard in version 5 of dbQwikSite. It is shaping up to be an very interesting release. Top on the list of things we are addressing: Vista compatibility, ASP.net code generation, integration to HTML editors, some nifty reports on your project, and XML project file format. Enhanced layouts, giving you more control over you page appearance, as well as supporting layouts on data entry pages. As usual we have more ideas than we have time so, no promises just hints of what you can expect.

dbQwikEdit is also active with lots of tweaks. Some bug fixes and a lot of performance enhancements. We should have a new release out next week.

dbQwikSync is now active with the product design team. This little data moving program is about to grow up. The product design department are moving beyond data, and eying database schemas. Imagine if you will, connecting to two unlike databases, and pressing a button, all the table structures are synchronized, and the data too. …well that’s the idea anyway! This is still in the Imagineering phase. Stay tuned for updates on what happens to our little data mover.

Blizzard hits Bangkok!

2007 holds great promise, but not without a few bumps along the way. Our web site visitors will know that we hit a small hiccup just coming out of the holiday season, our web hosting provider got hit by a blizzard. Actually they are located in Canada, TheDevShop is in Bangkok. Please forgive the sensationalism in our headline, and the retouched image, but in a sense it is true. It is interesting to see how the internet is indeed a global community, sharing not only information, but weather too!

A number of our web sites were hit, these include a all our product sites, our support site and on-line store web site. These were down was down almost 24 hours on Jan 10^th. After digging through the snow drifts, our hosting company was able to reach the servers to get them back on-line. All our web sites are now up and running, our apologies to all who were inconvenienced by this outage. We invite all of you back to our sites to continue your browsing, support and shopping.

dbQwikSite Full Trial Available

The long awaited Full Trial Edition of dbQwikSite is now available for download. This Edition allows you to try all the features of all editions of dbQwikSite. You can open, design and test on your PC. The only restriction is that the pages cannot be deployed (published). The generated pages are encrypted and run only in dbQwikWebServer, which is automatically installed when you install dbQwikSite.


If you don’t know about our versions, PE is a free version and doubles as a “Trial” version. However many features of the advanced versions (PRO and Ecommerce) are not available in PE. While this is not an issue for PE users who want a free tool, for the other group of PE users that want a way to demo more advanced features they could not do so. PE now does not have to do “double-duty” as a free “lite” edition and as a demo edition. I hope this opens the door for TheDevShop to make PE more tuned to it’s true target audience in the future. And for those of you who want a risk free test drive of dbQwikSite in it’s fullest capability, Full Trial is just the ticket.

You can download dbQwikSite Full Trial Edition from: http://www.dbQwikSite.com/download.html

dbQwikSite 4.2.3.1 MySQL and Database Enhancements

This week’s release of dbQwikSite directly addresses the area that users have the most problems with. Without a doubt, database connectivity is the single most troublesome area for new users. It is a hard issue to make “go away” because the reality is that dbQwikSite does not manage connections, Microsoft does… well Windows does. dbQwikSite just “uses” connections. The tough part for our developers is to make they whole “connection thing” seamless and transparent.

Unlike other applications that need only to connect to a dedicated database, dbQwikSite has to connect to any database you pick. To further complicate matters, that database may be on your PC, on a server on your network, or on a hosted server on the internet. The possible combinations become large; layer in security restrictions, on our PC, on your web server and on your host. Add to the mix that dbQwikSite can also “switch databases”, either at design or while publishing, you may begin to understand why connecting to databases is what Support hears about most often.

So what have we done to make life easier for our users? In this release, we have reworked our “front end” to Microsoft connection managers (ODBC and ADO) hopefully landing you where you need to be to define your connections. We have reworked the connection manager and the database connection wizard to help you define connections.

But that is not enough. Why? Because, if you are using the ever popular MySQL, on a commercial hosts the company may block remote connections for security reasons. Or working over remote connections may be simply too slow. Now we’re stuck! dbQwikSite wants to see your database to help you design your web pages. So now what? Our developers never rest until you are happy!

A few versions back we introduced a little tool to import MySQL script. This let you import a MySQL script to create a local “clone” of your database. You needed to create your MySQL script using phpMyAdmin, a popular web administration tool for MySQL. Little did we know that this utility would become so popular. In this release, we revamp this utility, with some major enhancements. The most important of the enhancements is the introduction of a “live” import. This allows you to connect to your MySQL database and clone selected tables to your PC. You no longer have to produce scripts, transfer them to your PC and import them, although this option still exists in the event that your hosting company refuses remote connections. We also beefed up the capability of this utility. We’ve added support for some of the more unusual data types of MySQL like ENUM and SET. We also reworked the data transformations to produce better data migration results. Little things like text values containing quotes, which can throw a data import sideways have been addressed in this release.

So as we roll Christmas Season, I hope that our support staff can take a well deserved rest, seeing fewer support issues. And for our users, who find, dbQwikSite in your Christmas stocking, here’s to a painless connection to your database so that you can discover all the great features inside dbQwikSite, without hitting any database connection turbulence.