************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * April 2000 * * * ************************************* News and Comments I gave a virtual presentation at the UK DATABUS User Group meeting in Birmingham, England on April 4th. The presentation was a 15 minute Quicktime movie of me talking. Part of the movie was my talking head and the rest was voice narration over traditional slides. The movie was played on a Windows 98 machine and projected on a screen. At the end of the presentation, I answered questions via speakerphone. The feedback that I received was positive. The topic of the virtual presentation was the current status of the DB/C software family and our plans for the future. This month's article is a transcript of that speech. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Text of Speech Birmingham, England April 4, 2000 Hello, I'm Don Wills. Today, I'll be talking about the current status of DB/C and directions for the future. After this presentation has finished playing and if the technology works, I'll be available by speakerphone to answer questions and make a few additional comments. As many of you know, the DB/C product line was spun off from Subject, Wills and Company on January 1st of this year. A new company was created to continue developing and selling the DB/C software products. The name of the new company is the DB/C Software Company. We also spun off the ProducePro software product from Subject, Wills and Company on January 1st. The name of that new company is ProducePro Incorporated. You're probably not familiar with ProducePro. It's an application software product for the wholesalers in the produce industry - that is, companies that buy and sell apples, bananas, etc. The ProducePro software runs all aspects of a produce wholesale company. It includes order processing, inventory, transportation, sales analysis, accounting and much more. We currently have over 40 companies running ProducePro in the United States. The ProducePro software is written in DB/C and consists of over two million lines of code. The ProducePro company web address is www.producepro.com. All three companies, DB/C Software Company, ProducePro Incorporated and Subject, Wills and Company are owned by Dave Subject and myself. We plan to continue to operate them as we have in the past. One common question we get about the spin off is: Why did you do it? The basic answer to that question is that the old Subject, Wills and Company was losing focus because it was trying to do too many things. Thus by spinning off DB/C and ProducePro, each of the three companies can be more focused. A more interesting answer to that question for users of DB/C is that the spin off was done to protect the future of DB/C. Subject, Wills and Company is being re-focused as an e-commerce solutions provider. We have chosen Java as the primary programming language for e-commerce related software development. We didn't want DB/C to become neglected, so Dave and I decided to make it a separate company. Although we don't provide public financial statements, last year the DB/C Software Division of Subject, Wills and Company had its highest dollar revenue in several years and had a respectable profit margin. As an independent company, this year we expect the DB/C Software Company to show moderate sales and profit growth. Subject, Wills and Company and the DB/C Software Company will continue to share offices for at least the rest of this year. We are planning to move ProducePro into new offices in July or August. The DB/C software family today consists of three products: DB/C FS, DB/C JX and DB/C DX. DB/C FS is a file server product for the DB/C file system - that is DB/C text, isam and aimdex files. DB/C FS provides two types of access to files. The first type of access is traditional file I/O. By traditional file I/O, I mean open, read, readks, write, insert, etc. The second type of access is SQL. The SQL interface is implemented by ODBC and JDBC drivers that are supplied with all versions of DB/C FS. Using the ODBC client interface, you can access DB/C files using SQL statements from Win32 applications like Access, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, Excel, Crystal Reports and many others. Using the JDBC client interface, you can access DB/C files using SQL statements from any Java program. DB/C FS client programs communicate with the DB/C FS server via TCP/IP. This means that any client program can access DB/C files via a local area network, a corporate wide intranet, or by the Internet. Unlike traditional DB/C file access where all index blocks move across the network, with DB/C FS, only the actual records are transmitted. This provides better performance, particularly when you're using the Internet. The current release of DB/C FS is version 2.2. [2.2.1 was released April 3rd] There are two new features in DB/C FS that were added to DB/C FS 2.2. The first new feature is a C programming interface for file-oriented access. We had added a Java programming interface for file-oriented access in DB/C FS version 2.1, so now programmers that want to have file-oriented access to DB/C files can choose between three languages: DB/C, Java and C/C++. The second new feature is support for files larger than 2GB. This large file support is only available if the operating system provides for it. This large file support works on Windows NT and 2000, on AIX and on HPUX. It isn't available on LINUX or any SCO UNIX. DB/C JX is a compiler product that compiles traditional DB/C source programs to Java class files. Included with the DB/C JX product is a royalty free license to use the runtime support class library for single user applications. Separate runtime licenses may be purchases for multi-user systems. The current release of DB/C JX is version 2.1.2. This version fixes several bugs and was released in January. Some of the new features include support for fractional seconds in PAUSE and TRAP, support for commas instead of decimals in KEYIN and DISPLAY of numeric variables, support for TIFF, BMP, JPEG, PNG and GIF files, and support for direct PDF file output from printing. DB/C DX is the traditional DB/C native compiler and runtime product. DB/C DX is available only for Win32 and UNIX platforms. The current release of DB/C DX is version 10.0.4. It was released in January. We plan to release version 10.0.5 in the near future. [10.0.5 was released April 17th] For those unfamiliar with DB/C DX version 10, it is just the next major version after DB/C 9.1. DB/C was renamed DB/C DX to become part of the DB/C family of software products. There are several new features in DB/C DX version 10. The most important new feature is support for accessing files through DB/C FS. This feature allows DB/C DX programs to connect with the DB/C FS server for file open, close, read, write, etc. If you choose to access files managed by a DB/C FS server, you can still access local files. Configuration options can be specified to direct access to local files and multiple DB/C FS servers. Other features new in DB/C DX version 10 are: 1. Support for directly printing PDF files in both Win32 and UNIX. 2. Support for files larger than 2GB. 3. Support for a maximum index key length increase from 99 characters to 359 characters. 4. Support for numeric field sorting with the SORT utility. This feature causes negative numbers to be sorted before positive numbers. 5. Support for installing DB/C DX as a Windows NT or Windows 2000 service. 6. Support for commas instead of decimals in KEYIN and DISPLAY. 7. Support for various printer setup options including bin selection. 8. Various minor improvements in GUI functionality including drawing of center and right justified text and smart truncation of text in LISTBOX and DROPBOX controls. 9. Support for fractional seconds in TRAP and PAUSE. We have plans for major enhancements to DB/C DX and DB/C FS this year. We don't any plans for a major upgrade to DB/C JX this year, although we will continue to provide functional parity with DB/C DX with the DB/C JX maintenance releases. DB/C DX version 11 will be released later this year. It's major new feature will be support for distributed user interface processing. Thin client is another name for this. This feature allows both GUI and character mode DB/C programs to run on one platform while the user-interface actually runs on another platform. The client software will be implemented with both Win32 executables and Java executable class files. We feel that many DB/C users will use this feature to provide a superior solution for applications used over the Internet or applications used in a mixed UNIX/Windows environment. Several other smaller enhancements are also planned for DB/C DX 11. DB/C FS version 3 will be released later this year. Several new features in version 3 include support support for DATE data types, support for wildcards in file names in the DBD file, support for logging of record read, write, update and delete operations, and support for more complex SQL SELECT statements. Today, e-commerce is the major driving force in many software development efforts. E-commerce means many different things - shopping cart software, EDI transmission of orders and invoices, email notification of shipment status, and much more. Almost all e-commerce systems depend on TCP/IP. There are several higher level protocols are involved: HTTP, FTP, and SMTP are examples. Regardless of the higher level protocol, when data is sent on the Internet, security is a concern. Encryption is the solution to address the security issue. We will continue to enhance DB/C in light of the security requirements of e-commerce. DB/C has directly supported TCP/IP for several years. Customers have found a variety of innovative uses for the TCP/IP support. In a future release, we plan to enhance the DB/C TCP/IP facility with industry standard encryption and authentication operations. Most customers using DB/C today are running on a version of Windows or a version of UNIX. We recognize that customers need to be able to run their applications on different platforms. Our DB/C JX product allows DB/C programs to run on a wider variety of platforms, including MacOS, OS/2 and more. However, DB/C FS is limited to just Win32 and UNIX operating systems. One notable deficiency of DB/C FS is its inability to run directly on a Netware server. We plan to rectify this situation in a future release of DB/C FS. And we will also be looking into other platforms for DB/C FS. Another area of future work is to enhance the SQL capabilities of DB/C FS. We will be adding support for several additional data types. We will enhancing the supported syntax of SELECT. And we will be making the SQL execution engine smarter which should result in improved performance for certain SELECT operations. Thanks for your attention. ****************************************************************************** DB/C Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX and JX Language Fundamentals Date: July, 2000 (tentatively the week of July 10th) Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, contact Judi Tamkevic at: voice 630.572.0240 email admin@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you when it is produced, just send an email message to 'request@dbcsoftware.com' and put the line 'subscribe dbcnews' in the body of the email message (omit the ' characters). The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent. To stop delivery, put the line 'unsubscribe dbcnews' in the body of the message.