[Poop-scoop] ANNOUNCE: Alzabo 0.45

[Dave R. <au...@ur...>]

Alzabo is a program and a module suite, with two core functions. Its first
use is as a data modelling tool. Through either a schema creation
interface or a perl program, you can create a set of schema, table,
column, etc.  objects to represent your data model. Alzabo is also capable
of reverse engineering your data model from an existing system.

Its second function is as an RDBMS to object mapping system. Once you have
created a schema, you can use the Alzabo::Runtime::Table and
Alzabo::Runtime::Row classes to access its data. These classes offer a
high level interface to common operations such as SQL SELECT, INSERT,
DELETE, and UPDATE commands.


This release incorporates a number of new features and bugfixes.


Changes:

0.45

Incompatibilities:

- The 'dbm_file' parameter given when loading a syncing module that
used DBM files (such as Alzabo::ObjectCache::Sync::SDBM_File) has been
changed to 'sync_dbm_file', because this release includes a new cache
storage module that uses DBM files as well.

- The schema creator now requires HTTP::BrowserDetect.

- Fix what was arguably a bug in the caching/syncing code.
Previously, one process could update a row and another process could
then update that same row.  Now the second process will throw an
exception.

Bug fixes:

- Accidentally left debugging turned on in Alzabo::Exceptions.

- The schema creator did not allow you to remove a length or precision
setting for a column once it had been made.

- Require a length for CHAR and VARCHAR columns with MySQL.

- Add error on setting precision for any column that doesn't allow
them with MySQL.

- The interaction of caching rows and Alzabo::MethodMaker was not
right.  Basically, it was determined at compile time whether or not to
use the cached row class but this needs to be determined at run time.
This has been fixed.

- Using the Alzabo::Runtime::Row->rows_by_foreign_key method would
fail when the column in one table did not have the same name as a
column in the other table.  Reported by Michael Graham (along with a
correct diagnosis, thanks!).

- Don't specify a database name when creating or dropping a database.
Reported and patched by Dana Powers.

Enhancements:

- Rules violations error messages (bad table name, for example) in the
schema creator are now handled in a much friendlier manner.  Instead
of the big error dump exception page it returns you to the page you
submitted from with an error message.

- Add Alzabo::Create::Column->alter method which allows you to change
the column type, length, and precision all at once.  This is necessary
because some of the column type validation code will insist that a
column have a length setting.  If you try to change them in two
separate operations it will throw an exception.

- Add Alzabo::ObjectCache::Store::Null - This allows you to use any
multi-process syncing module without using up the memory that
Alzabo::ObjectCache::Store::Memory uses.

- Add Alzabo::ObjectCache::Store::BerkeleyDB - I'm not sure if storing
in a db file is really a performance win (vs. null storage) because of
the work needed to freeze & thaw the row objects.  Benchmarks are
needed.

- Add support for fulltext indexes (MySQL).

- Don't show fulltext or column prefix options when creating indexes
for databases that don't support these features.

- Use cardinality & dependency language for relations.

- Add some style to the schema creator (via stylesheets).  It looks a
little better now.