The first contours of version 3.1

 administrator    05 Apr 2023
 None    blog

assist_min.jpg

We haven't been resting...

We got some questions about the features that will become available in version 3.1. And as we can imagine that most of our users want to know, we will start by making posts about the features available in this upcoming version. But not before I have said a big thanks to all of you for your input, wishes, requests, remarks, and mostly positive feedback. It is highly appreciated! We try hard to keep up and to perform the best in our response to you. We honestly believe that it is not the art of finding new customers but keeping your current. Too many companies focus on finding new customers and forget their current user pool when the current users should be the ambassador for your product. And to appreciate your work, we have a bounty program. If you are a customer of PHsPeed with a license that is at least 6 months old, then you will get two months free for each customer you bring in.

But what about 3.1?

First of all, and as usual, we fixed a few issues.

  • The tabs in the IDE could be moved with the mouse, while the content stayed the same, causing wrong labels above the tabs. Not something most of you will have noticed, but it was there and is fixed.
  • A more serious one was an obscure error that caused some kind of infinite loop in certain Master-detail relationships. The screen kept refreshing. This one is fixed, and the customers reporting them already have a hotfix available.
  • Sometimes annoying, setting and releasing breakpoints during a debug session was not applied immediately. That is corrected.

Most of the fixed issues can be found in our bug tracker. Yes, I know. It doesn't look fine while we are on PHP 8.1. But we will replace the FireSpray bug tracker with a PHsPeed build version soon. And the good news is, it will also be available for our customers as a sample application.

Then the new features, and we're excited to share these. I will not go into detail yet but will do it in the following posts.

  • Support for conditional breakpoints. This will allow to add an expression to the breakpoint that will fire if the condition is true. Very useful for developers.
  • Support for UUID datatype. This datatype is a unique identifier currently supported by more databases that we can no longer ignore. For MySQL / MariaDB users: this datatype is only supported in the latest versions of MariaDB. For MySQL, the datatype remains varchar.
  • Last-minute ddl extraction. In environments where there are a huge number of tables, retrieving metadata could have a very slow response. To improve, PHsPeed will only retrieve table info when required. Tables not in use will not be touched, which improves the responsiveness hugely.
  • Cosmetic but highly requested: rounded input fields are now supported.
  • Also highly requested: PHsPeed will now only include javascript and css files that are in use, depending on the components that you have put on the form.
  • Code snippets for creating a simple query or email. This will reduce development time because you don't have to look up syntax and properties. Just enter a few parameters, and PHsPeed will generate the code. This feature will be enhanced over the upcoming versions.
  • If you use the refined search option, then you will be able to add a hide/show button.
  • DBnav button properties can now be changed in the events. Change the label and color on the fly.
  • It is now possible to apply for flooding protection. Someone flooding your login page will end up in the ban list after a configurable amount of attempts.
  • The label component now behaves like all the other components, which means it will follow the form rules of label positioning.
  • The code completion is enhanced with the object methods.
  • You can now use forms in a master-detail relationship.
  • On large projects, it is handy to group modules together. This module to organise your project is improved.
  • Debug run when you require a setup of globals can now be set as program parameters.
  • The CSS editor is simplified.

I can imagine that some of these items are a bit unclear. But in the next weeks, we will go over the enhancements. The current status is that we are finishing some of the features before we will start with our alpha testing.

Happy coding!