Dimitry Sibiryakov wrote:

>
> It's my first experience with IB API. I put a few buttons
> onto a form, named them "Start trans", "Prepare", "Exec"
> and so on, wrote the appropriate code and started to press
> them in different orders. Got a bundle of "right" errors,
> found a couple of interesting things (as an example: a
> prepared statement lives longer than the transaction) and this
> strange behavior.
>

The api is a little more brittle than one would like - there is very
much an underlying assumption that developers do all the right things in
the correct order. This can be a little difficult as the documentation
does not always explain those assumptions.

The api has never really been the standard way of accessing InterBase.
Developers typically use an intermediate layer. Before gui ide's it
would have been gpre and embedded sql. This automatically handles all
the generation of the correct api calls in the correct order.

Since the Borland era (for want of a better term) almost all access has
been via middleware such as the BDE or IBO. One or two developers have
worked out all the issues surrounding the usage of the api and
encapsulated them into generic objects.

If there were more developers working daily at the api level the
gotcha's and the "don't do that's!" would be more obvious. And incorrect
usage that crashed the server would get fixed a bit quicker.

But the middleware options, for the most part, are more than adequate
for probably 99.9% of developers, so I don't see a flood of api level
developers appearing. Still there are a few, so keep firing the
questions.


Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
taking InterBase further