All,

I just realized my messages were not making it through to the list for the
past several weeks. Therefore, you have probably thought I was off on
vacation or something. I will go through my old messages that were rejected
(I started using a different email program) and resubmit the ones that still
may be of value.

Since things have been so quiet from me, here is a brief summary of my
activities in the past couple months.
I have been very busy and very productive, with some helpers too.

IBO 5.x with widestring support is now ready for beta testing. (It currently
shows as IBO 4.9.13.x)
Please let me know if you would like to start doing beta testing of this new
release.

I'd like to clear up a few matters as well. I realize I made a significant
mistake in how I handled the transition to Delphi 2009. I imposed upon you
to make your applications use the ansistring and ansichar variable types in
order to preserve the old way of doing things. Thus, that was an irritating
transition to have to make such wide-sweeping changes in your application
code. And, now that I am realizing the error of my ways, we are going to
have to reverse all of that and return things more to how they normally
were. In short, unfortunately, my unwise decision made this transition more
difficult overall than it needed to be.

I have decided to keep the 4.9.x code base and not fork IBO for proper
widestring support. I finally saw how I could make it all work in a single
codebase. Thus, I will have a single product that will simultaneously
support Delphi 5 and higher. It will make use of the string type throughout
and thereby properly support all widestring capabilities in Delphi 2009 and
higher. I will also go to whatever lengths I can to support widestring
capabilities in the earlier versions of Delphi for the non-visual
components, provided that Delphi has the capabilities. UTF handling
functions were new to Delphi 6 but I could make use of 3rd party UTF8
handline routines if there is a request (and some assistance) from those
wishing to have such. The benefit of this is all of the capabilities that
get added into the future of IBO 5.x will be somewhat backwards compatible
to the earlier versions of Delphi 5, etc.

Earlier I spoke of making IBO 5.x a rewrite in preparation for making a
driver layer between InterBase and Firebird. I still plan to work in that
direction. This will be accomplished in IBO 6.x instead of IBO 5.x.

Also, there are two individuals in the Free Pascal/Lazarus development
team/community that have stepped forward and offered to help me port IBO to
Free Pascal/Lazarus. The three of us have been working very diligently to
get IBO 4.9.13.x working in this IDE. Our progress is very substantial. All
of the non-visual components are finished. Much of the visual controls are
functional with only minor kinks to work out. By the time we are finished it
should be quite straight forward to port an application from Delphi over to
Lazarus (provided your 3rd party controls are also ported). This will enable
you to create Linux and MacOS applications as well as Windows applications
with one application code base. I am quite excited about this because I
won't have to purchase Windows licensing for much of my infrastructure that
I have written using IBO.

In the process of this effort, I have started using SVN as a means to
coordinate work between multiple developers. I will at some point be setting
up an SVN repository that will become the means for distributing and
coordinating development on IB Objects. All those interested in
participating with IBO's development at this level of detail can send me a
private email requesting to be notified of this when it becomes available.

I also want to report that revenue from IBO trustware licenses is just
enough to enable me to make IBO my full-time effort. We have had to deplete
our savings some and are into some debt, but I am very confident that IBO
will have a very nice rebound when I remedy all of the areas I have been
slow to address, such as proper wide string support. I am so grateful to all
those who have kept their confidence level and continued to provide revenue
during this challenging period of time for me. It feels wonderful to be
right on the edge of making good on all of your faith.

Kind regards,
Jason Wharton