Lazarus Internet Development

In a move that shows the power of Drupal, the same package I use to manage this site and to set up customer sites, Scribus has moved their website management to Drupal. Why don't you drop me a line to see what Drupal can do for you?

More details here: http://www.scribus.net/?q=news/20080505_wwwtodrupal

A better question is probably what can't you do? Drupal is easily one of the most extensible content management systems available. Rather than try to make an exhaustive list, let me provide you with a few examples of what I have done with Drupal. I'm sure you can extrapolate from these and come up with your own ideas.

E-Commerce

For those of you who didn't catch the news, first I updated the installer for the bulk loader so that it actually included the program. Seemed like a nice thing to do. Right now it's just a zip file, but give me a little bit and I'll make it back into a program installer. More importantly, I've been busy working on the ability to capture and recreate the database schema as well.

I'm a big fan of wxWidgets, principally because it gives me a uniform coding platform to write GUI apps on any operating system. On Windows we have always had the option to embed binary data like images in our programs using resource files, but a similar functionality was unavailable to the UNIX programmer. Until now.

Bulk ExtractorI hadn't planned to write the data extractor right away, because I had a tool that was doing it for me. Or so I thought. While I was trying to extract data with the old Delphi-written tool yesterday I ran into a big show-stopping snag. So my hand being forced, because I really needed to transfer this data, I wrote the extractor. It's not quite as polished as the bulk loader yet, but it's not bad.

This product isn't available for public consumption yet, but I thought I would give everyone a taste of what's to come. It's a bulk data loader for doing SQL Server application installs, especially installs that need to load a lot of data. Bulk Data Loader

If you have a few megabytes of data to load into your database (The application I wrote it for has about 600 MB to load), using SQL Insert statements is too slow. SQL Server's Bulk Insert command makes that load in a snap.

I've been playing around with an update to the template library for some time, replacing my mildly leaking tree implementation with a red black tree implementation from the OpenBSD project. It's faster and requires less code than my implementation. I think we can also safely assume that it was written by somebody who is smarter than me. I always like to use code from smart people whenever I can.

Version 2.3 of the Registration Component has been released. There are several new features to the plugin and the tools that are worth noting:

• Improved Serial Number Dialog thanks to nsDialogs. Serial Number screen
• Generate custom libraries directly from the GUI client
• Example scripts to start you off with a professional looking installer right away.

Last week I wrote about a vexation with installs that I'm sure many of you have experienced--continually re-entering serial numbers and registration keys during upgrades. What I didn't supply at the time was a solution to the problem. I've been working on an update to Lazarus Registration that uses the new nsDialogs plugin, and I figured as long as I was in there I'd add a solution to the upgrade problem.