At 04:36 PM 19/01/2008, you wrote:

>I have been using Firebird 2.0.3 with .NET very well, and very very
>happy. Now I need to do a fairly medium size database system on latest
>MAC OS (Leopard).
>
>Does Firebird interface very well with XCode and Cocoa?

Don't know about this but isn't XCode intended for use with an ODBC driver? There are Firebird ODBC drivers for POSIX platforms. And Cocoa is C++? I would be surprised if you couldn't get the answers you need by subscribing to the IBPP discussion list, https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ibpp-discuss . IBPP itself was developed by a shop that uses Macs.

>What interface shold I use for the development. For example, there is a QuickLite middleware for SQLite. .NET provider for C# interface with Firebird.
>What do I need to use so that I can use Firebird with XCode and Cocoa.

An interface, by its very nature, works in two directions. On one side it communicates with the database engine, on the other it communicates with a client programming environment. So - the driver you choose depends on what your client programming environment is.

>Do I need to write raw C code to develop on MAC?

You could if you wanted to. ;-) Any of the drivers "wraps" Firebird's application programming interface (API) - that's the dynamic library fbclient or libfbclient (sorry, don't know the extension suffix for dynlibs/shared objects on Mac) that comes in the Firebird kit. If you really want to do it the hard way, you can program in C directly to the API without using a wrapper layer at all.

>I looked around on the Internet but found no information. Any pointer
>will be highly appreciated.

Hope this helps you to find some useful links. Firebird hasn't (so far) had a "Mac community" but the latest porting efforts should be a positive step. I hope that, sooner rather than later, the Mac application developers will want to get their act together and take up my long-standing invitation to start up a Mac section at our website.

> Would Paul Beach or Alex Peshkov have any information or advise?

Paul and Alex did the latest v.1.5.5 and 2.0.3 ports for both Mac platforms. The sad news (for you) is that neither of them is a Mac developer. Both are UNIX/Linux men. Alex works full-time in the core Firebird project, which is in C++. Paul suffers from demonic urges to port Firebird to abstruse platforms. :-)

That the recent (and ongoing) MacOSX porting frenzy happened at all was made possible by the donation of a Macbook to the Firebird project by the same benefactor who developed IBPP and gave it to the world for free use - so, if C++ is your game, that looks at least like a good starting place...

./heLen