Tuesday, October 17 - Qcodo Beta 3 Pre-Release

After a lot of exciting anticipation, I'm happy to announce the PRE RELEASE of Qcodo Beta 3!

There are a <B>LOT</B> of changes in this new release, which will break Backward Compatability against prior releases of Qcodo.  Beta 1 -> Beta 2 broke BC as well, but presented a tremendous step in the front end of Qcodo, adding a comprehensive component-based event-driven server-side AJAX control API.  In a similar way, although Beta 2 -> Beta 3 does break BC, it presents a tremendous step mostly in the back end of Qcodo.

We've been able to get a lot of stuff into this release, but because we are still hoping to get a lot more pretty big/major updates and pieces of functionality into Beta 3, we decided to call this a Pre Release for now.

The highlights thus far include:
** A completely new Release Management System, including the Qcodo Update Service.  Think “Windows Update” for your Qcodo installation... only better.  Once you have upgraded to Qcodo Beta 3, upgrading AND downgrading to new/old releases of ANY version of Qcodo (>= beta 3) will become a minutes-long process.  (Note, that the update service will only work once you have upgraded to Qcodo Beta 3.  The Update Service will unfortunately not be able to perform upgrades/updates on prior versions.)
** Full XHTML compatability -- and the examples site was rewritten and completely validated against XHTML 1.1
** A rearchitected code gen engine which will soon offer support for non database-based data sources (like REST/SOAP/RSS servers/services, etc.), as well as a single, modularized Codegen Settings (XML) file to be able to perform codegens against an unlimited number of data sources all in one shot.
** The new Qcodo Query API - a fully object oriented approach to performing SQL Load queries
** Added emphasis on security and ease of deploying-to-production: the filesystem and directory tree hiearchy has been completely reorganized (qcodo directories can now be installed anywhere on your server, not just in docroot).
** Centralized HTML Entities and secured/”locked down” print functionality to, by default, always perform HTML entities (this is of course always explicitly overridable)
** Form Validation has been greatly improved, along with the addition of Form_Validate() for custom form-level validation.
** And as a bonus, the much anticipated examples site page on handling multiple QForms by using custom QPanels.

We now have a centralized change log at <http://www.qcodo.com/view.php/release_changelog> which will log all changes of new release from here on out.  And because of the new release management system, we should hopefully be seeing much more frequent updates to the Qcodo release.

because of this, we are now beginning to institute a STABLE and DEVELOPMENT release pattern.  You should always be able to see the latest STABLE and DEV releases on the Downloads page.  And of course, with Qcodo 3, you'll be able to upgrade to the most recent version of either the stable or development release by simply running the qcodo_updater command line tool:

qcodo/_devtools.cli/qcodo_updater.cli development
qcodo/_devtools.cli/qcodo_updater.cli stable
qcodo/_devtools.cli/qcodo_updater.cli 0.3.1
etc.

The Pre Release is currently considered a development release, and can be downloaded at <http://www.qcodo.com/downloads/>.

Please download, test and try it out.  We need everyone's help in providing feedback so that we can get this to STABLE as soon as possible.  Thanks!

It´s very good.

We are following the evolution of the Qcodo, and being able to see as the PHP is a powerful language. The QCodo this if becoming powerful framework of high speed.

Mike Ho, don´t say thanks, cause we have to say: thanks !

Mike Ho, this is huge release, but I'm not sure why Qcodo is still under Beta, are u hidding something...or u just playing the game Google and Microsoft have been playing us with Gmail Beta and Windows Live Beta respectively,

In any occasion, I still think Qcodo is the bomb it brings the best of PHP5, I've been thinking objects for quite a while now...

Like Renoldi from Brazil said, “don't say thanks, cause we have to say: thanks!”

I am extremely excited to really dig in using Beta3 and writing QQueries, just still floating in mid-learning-curve.  Is there a way to output the generated SQL statement, so that I can see what exactly is happening?

Heres what I'm trying, let me know if the logic is right.. an association table would be better to use instead of a comma delimited list of ids, but im just curious if I am on the right path.

$objCampaignArray = Campaign::QueryArray(
        QQ::In(
            QQN::Campaign()->SurveyId, Survey::QueryArray(
                QQ::In(
                    QQN::Survey()->Id, split(',', $strSurveyIdsCommaSeperated)
                )
            )
        ), 
        $objOptionalClauses
    );

Good job Mike, you rock the PHP world!

Thanks for beta 3 Mike, seems to add a lot of awesome stuff. However, wanted to post a warning to everyone who used beta 2, upgrading to 3 is PAINFUL!!

I can almost guarantee that you're going to have to change each and every file.

Here are some examples:

1) Changed prepend.inc (and all other .inc) to prepend.inc.php. This means every files reference needs to be changed that uses qcodo unless you want to change the new file to match the old, but then things like codegen and others that come with qcodo need to be changed.

2) Directory name changes. Lots of these, so if you're using CVS, I feel sorry for you.

3) Not only is the new OQL introduced, but its pretty much required. For example, wherever I've loaded blogs with something such as:

$this->dtrRecentBlogList->DataSource = Blog::LoadAll('create_date desc', '10');

The new Blog::LoadAll function takes a totally different parameter list, namely one $objOptionalClauses. This is going to require me to make massive code changes on just about every file.

anyhow, beta 3, cool, but painful to migrate to for sure.