On Dec 13, 2004, at 9:39 AM, Werner F. Bruhin wrote:

>
> Hi Myles,
>
> Myles Wakeham wrote:
>> Helen has a good point. We've just completed a plug-in for Firebird
>> on OSX
>> for 4th Dimension developers, and this question comes up quite often.
>> As
>> 4th Dimension is cross-platform for Windows and Mac OSX, and Windows
>> users
>> have an 'embedded' version of FB, the Mac users think that they are
>> losing
>> out by not having this.
>>
>> The fact is that as Mac OSX is based on *NIX, we can EASILY create a
>> simple
>> installer to include FB on the Mac as part of the overall installation
> Even on Windows one can/could do this.
>
> [...]

To answer your original question, there is no prepackaged "embedded"
version of FB for OS X. But making your own should be very
straightforward. On OS X firebird is packaged using the native
framework mechanism. All the files needed to use FB are located within
this framework, and multiple frameworks can be installed on a machine
at any point in time. There is a fixed framework search order which
includes a special directory within an application. So an "embedded"
version should be as simply as placing the FB framework inside the
framework directory for your specific application. An additional
optimization would be to remove the unused executables (isql, gbak,
etc) to reduce the size of the framework. If you start with SS you get
an "embedded" version that can only connect to FB servers over the
network (including loopback). If you start with CS then your program
will be able to directly access databases. I haven't had the need to
try this myself, so there may be a few gotchas along the way. But it
should be pretty easy to get working, and doesn't require any custom
compilation of the source, just custom packaging.

-John