Other News

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is now the minimum version supported. The application will not work on versions older than SQL Server 2008 because of a change in the way large text and media data is being stored. This is a good thing because the application was having to do something special for Microsoft and now there is only one method for handling text and binary blobs for all RDBMS vendors.

It has recently come to my attention that the buploader name has been registered as a .com and that site provides a file sharing service. I want to make it clear that this buploader site has nothing at all to do with anything that is benwillies and that none of my software has been used to build, operate or interact with this "buploader web site" in any way. Unfortunately, the choice of that domain name has led to an increased interest in the benwillies buploader script that has been widely distributed and freely available since mid 2005. The buploader script is an XML/Soap client for consuming the benwillies file sharing web service and although it only works with benwillies, it has been downloaded many times, presumably as an example of how to write a XML/Soap web client in php. Regardless, the buploader script will NEVER WORK with the buploader.com site, even if you try and modify it.

A milestone occurred this morning, which had the unfortunate effect of causing the database to quit working and disabling all of the web sites. We ran out of disk space! The database has been extended and all is well now. Thank you for your patience.

My neighbor Hans just got back from a wonderful vacation in Europe and he was saying how much fun he had with his new digital camera. But how to share his collection of over 200 photos with his friends and family back in Germany? I suggested he checkout a few of those "Share Your Photos" web sites, like Webshots, Yahoo! Photos and Kodak Gallery, to name just three of the thousands of sites that offer this service, which are nearly always free, but with strings attached. He was familiar with some of these sites and had posted a few photos, but was not happy with them for a variety of reasons, so he asked me about using the benwillies site, which he found very easy to use. I knew there would be some problems because the necessary design decisions to support any type of file might detract from simply sharing one type of file, namely jpeg images, but I was happy he was willing to forge ahead since I needed some feedback on how the site was working. Perhaps the application can be even more tailored to make sharing photos with the general public easier without losing the needed robustness for supporting music, movies, flash, archived executables and text files.

Another web application that closely resembles the EMS to SAP Conversion application I built back in May, has been launched. A legacy client-server application for handling Production Cost Accounting is about to be retired and the data needs to be extracted and made available for archival purposes, so a new, stream-lined database and low maintenance client is needed. Since it is archival data, no updating will be allowed, outside of adding new users, so it's perfect for a LAMP solution. Development is expected to be completed in six weeks, which might be a little tight considering it will take more than a week just to transfer the data via bcp (around 12G) and most likely another week to define the new database and another week to write and test the conversion scripts and then there are the holidays, when many people will be on vacation.

A web site using the application framework I've been developing was accepted by the sponsors and deployed today. The site tracks the progress of converting the Expense Management System, a legacy client-server application, to the SAP system and provides a query mechanism of the converted data, a before and after kind of snapshot of the data. This proprietary site was built over a weekend and uses Microsoft IIS and SQL Server 2000 for the production environment, but was mostly developed on Mac OS X and MySQL and both environments are fully supported with the same code base. From a technical standpoint, this was a very simple application that accepts various search criteria from the user, queries the database and displays the results as a table. But by using my framework, they also got the ability to sort the list by clicking a column heading, choosing which columns get displayed for each query, drilldown functionality, caching of the result sets for maximum performance, pagination, easy customization using stylesheets, platform independence and a flexible security system based on profiles (roles) and segregation of the data by business unit (workgroup).