Ed,

I have been back-porting most every thing from IBO 5 to IBO 4 so there isn't
any significant differences in the core code itself. I license usage of IBO,
not IBO itself so I don't hold back new features just to get people to buy
an upgrade. I just keep them happy using it and look for them to keep a
current source subscription on an annual basis.

There are some enhancements to the IB_Export component that are unique to
IBO 5 so that you have better handling of Unicode and UTF8 output. I also
added the ability to export to a script file of INSERT statements. There are
also the Admin components that are now part of IBO 5. I am also redoing all
of the sample apps so that they work better. The only thing left holding up
an official release is the documentation.

I have also added a regression testing application so that all fixed bugs
(non-visual only) will be safeguarded against future regression. This also
has the benefit of making sure basic functionality is safeguarded as well.
It runs as a console application and makes debugging things very easy.

Actually, quite a bit of time is going into this effort not just for
accuracy, but I am also putting in algorithms to ensure IBO's optimizations
remain uncompromised. I recently added a very exhaustive check of the
handling of Insert/Edit/Delete handling in conjunction with 13 different
properties or conditions. That was a total of 8192 possible combinations and
among those I found a fair number of cases where there were inefficiencies
of duplicate actions and even some hard failures and inaccuracies. This led
to a significant number of improvements in the code that should have your
application's performance improved significantly and now the behaviour has
been perfected and locked in so that it won't change in the future. I back
ported these core code improvements to IBO 4 in build 52 as well.

I also have restructured IBO 5 into a number of sub-directories instead of
having everything piled up in a single directory. This is a bit of a
nuisance if you keep your search path in your individual project as there
are a number of paths to add for a typical GUI application but it's a
one-time thing. This is in an effort to try and make IBO development more
organized.

When moving from IBO 4 to IBO 5 you will need to update your search path
from the single IBO 4 folder to the multiple sub folders of IBO 5. You may
need to make some changes in how you use TIB_Export as I did change some
property names to be more platform independent. If you are maintaining an
app between IBO 4 and IBO 5 you can just use the #DEFINE I provide. You can
look at IBF_DataDump.pas for an example of this since it is used in both IBO
4 and IBO 5 with the TIB_Export component. That's pretty much it.

Hope this answers your questions.

Thanks for the compliment too!

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: IBObjects@yahoogroups.com [mailto:IBObjects@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Ed Dressel
Sent: 29 August 2012 09:25 AM
To: IBObjects@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [IBO] Build 52 released.

> I highly encourage people to start working with the IBO 5 sources.

can you comment on the change this requires? Is 5 out of beta? are there a
list of improvements for 5 anywhere?

> If you are more interested in having a version of IBO that remains
> stable, then stay on IBO 4.9.14 because I will only be patching it
> for significant bugs that cannot easily be worked around.

I'm still using 4.x and am happy. I like stable. You do excellent work
Jason!

Ed Dressel




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