Hi all,

Reed Mideke posted a list of things to do some days ago, for
those who want to actively contribute to Firebird but who
can not (or don't want to) actually start working on the
source code.

Well, i am one of those, but unfortunately nothing in his
list could be done by me (for various reasons: mainly lack
of time, *nix, tcs, cvs, test hardware and most of all C ;)

So i thought about what *else* pure Delphi/Win32 developers
like me could do. I remembered that when i started using IB,
what i missed most were good, well-documented demo
applications *and* gdb databases to learn from. (The MastSQL
app is nice but it didn't really help me much...

Like many other FB users i come from a dBase/Paradox/FoxPro
background, so i came up with the idea to start a Delphi5 sample
application that shows Firebird newcomers how to get started.

The app(s) should point out clearly how to start with:

a) Firebird itself, esp. its specials like the storedproc/trigger
language. (once i got it, it felt like Alice in Waferland as
there was nothing similar in the flat-file dbs i used before, but
the almost complete lack of useable examples in the docs made
it quite hard to start...)

b) the application design for a client/server database (as
opposed to desktop db app design, keywords: why not to use
TTables, what to do with Transactions, how to avoid temp tables
etc.)

c) the various ways to access IB/FB: IBO, BDE, IBX, FIB. Since this
should be a useable-by-everyone example, i'm afraid IBO/FIB are
out (though i use IBO exclusively and rate it best of all, but
a standard Firebird newbie will most likely have only BDE/IBX).

The best thing of course would be to have the same app for all of
the above, so the differences can be easily spotted... a matter
of available coding time :(

The topic of the app should be something everyone could think into.
Since i'm a hobbyist DJ i thought a music gdb would be a good place
to start (anyone has some CDs/tapes lying around i guess, so people
could play around with the app and feed it with their own "real life"
data while doing so). Apart from that i've always wanted to write that
thing for years, so this might be the right time to start :-)

The app could be downloaded from sourceforge or the upcoming Firebird
site (no more comment on that;) as twos zips: one containg the sources
of the app and a clearly documented SQL script file for the
GDB metadata, and a second with the app binaries and the gdb of the
database with some real content (i got some hundreds of CDs here to
fill it up as a start...). It should be so that after a new user
downloaded FB and installed it, he can immediately start with a real
app and gdb to see what FB can do.

A handy side effect would be to have an open test database for new
FB builds, so dummies like me with no idea how to set up a tcs<g>
could help with testing on win32 platforms. (and once we get the
full-import from cddb.com's db running, we could use it for stress/volume
testing, too<vbg>...)

Just an idea, what do you think - does that sound useful?

regards,
fingerman