mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Lester Caine <lester@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

François Marier wrote:
> Hi Lester,
>
> I'm very sorry for the time it took to respond to you. Being more open
> to other databases is certainly something we'd like to improve on in the
> future, so you're doing some really good work there.
I was out on site for a couple of days - just catching up myself.

> Now, the core firebird drivers should no longer be necessary on the
> master branch of Mahara since I upgraded yesterday to the latest version
> of adodb. I don't know if that's the version of Mahara you are basing
> your work on, but that's where we'd put your changes once they are ready
> to be merged.
The version I had been given to work with was 1.9.8+ (Build: 20100428) but 
moodle 2.0 is not using ADOdb !!!! It is using YET ANOTHER rewrite of what was 
perfectly functional code :(

> Another thing that would help us quite a bit is if you could, instead of
> attaching the whole codebase, provide a patch series for your changes.
> That way, we can see exactly what your changes are.
>
> Moodle has good documentation on how to create patches:
>
>    http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:How_to_create_a_patch

That would have been useful when I first posted :( Not for the patch stuff, 
since what I generated will allow any 1.9.8 user to update a clean copy to work 
with Firebird. I don't expect those users to know about patching. But some of 
the other bit like Eclipse/PHPEclipse ... which has been my development platform 
since long before PDT tried to muscle in. I did stop reading the documentation 
originally because most pages seemed to be out of date with the 1.9 code!

BUT ... While I could live with the level of XML crap in 1.9.8, your 2.0 build 
just adds too much processing overhead on top of ADOdb or rather INSTEAD OF 
ADOdb. One of the reasons that the XML side of ADOdb did not get much support 
was simply because it slowed everything down too much. Datadict schema 
management is fast and efficient and does not require a degree to edit things in 
the schema files. Or programs to manage them! I expect performance of 2.0 to be 
a LOT slower than 1.9.8 ....

I WAS looking to port modules of Moodle into the bitweaver framework. This 
duplicates some of the moodle packages, but more important from my point of view 
it adds a level of modularity where a single package can be added, modified or 
removed as required. I HAVE a functional copy of moodle running on Firebird. I 
do not have time to write a new driver in the new moodle format which gives ME 
nothing moving forward :(
so I'll stick with what I have working!

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk//
Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php

-- 
Firebird support development
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/572189
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mahara
Contributors, which is subscribed to Mahara.

Status in Mahara ePortfolio: New

Bug description:
Attached are a pair of drivers to add Firebird as an option on the supported databases. Class goes to xmldb library, and the adodb driver replaces the one currently provided.

The next step on this exercise is to work out how to handle wrapping of field names with double quotes. The normal practice has been to use 'backtick' as a hook to identify both field and table names that need processing. This is then replaced or removed as required before the SQL is run. This would - I think - tidy up a problem I am seeing currently in the code base where some fields have had double quotes added in the scripts, or bodge case statements adjust things for MySQL or Postgres .... A generic fix would allow the availability of other databases to be expanded? And I am happy to look at handling that.