3 February 08
Project Thoughts
Firstly, I’d like to show you my demo of FSQL (my SQL parser) in action: FSQL Demo
Just type your query and it will break it down into parts and tell you exactly what communication goes on between FSQL and the application using it. If you encounter anything that could be an error, just write a comment here or send me an email via the contact form.
Despite my lack of confidence in the development of ICMS a few months ago, I’ve decided to bring the project back to life and I have been working recently to clean it up. I made the decision to continue development when I gave the system a little run for the fun of it and decided that since it has reached such a stage, it may as well be released. I’ve done a great deal of work on the internals, so that the system is as flexible as possible. While plugins won’t be in the first release, I’m sure they’ll come later on.
A key feature will be the support of databases, and ICMS will be able to automatically detect the user’s DBMS and change the settings around to support it. And if the user doesn’t have a DBMS like MySql then a flat file alternative will be provided automatically (probably not FFD in the first release, but it’ll probably be added later). The idea is to make the system suit as many set ups as possible. I’m also working hard to make it work regardless of options such as open_basedir, register_globals and safe mode.
FFD 3 is still in development and should be released soon. However, it won’t be incredibly fast because I haven’t had the time available to implement the indexes. FSQL 1 is almost complete, so the SQL side of FFD is looking good.
After discovering that Game Maker applications can be incredibly slow I decided to abandon the Dominion Prestige project, since it would be too slow even if I optimised it loads. However, I did successfully implement a fairly fast 3D map editor that could be used for other projects. So, instead I’m biding my time and learning how to use various cross-platform graphics libraries (including opengl) with C/C++ so maybe I’ll be able to make the game or a 3D game on there once I’ve got it all down.
I’m also working on an idea for a commercial PHP application with a colleague, so we’ll see if anything comes from it in a few months.
Go ICMS! Have you thought about including support for sqlite?
FFD looks pretty cool – is it all written in PHP still?
ICMS already includes full (or at least just about full) support for sqlite and pdo_sqlite (2 ways to call sqlite), mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql, and txtsql (the flat file alternative).
FFD is still written in PHP, but development is slow because applying complex database techniques to the relatively slow platform of PHP and keeping within reasonable bounds in terms of execution time is difficult at best.