[Tcl-tdbc] ANN: TDBC 1.0b5 with driver for MySQL

[Kevin K. <ke...@ac...>]

I am pleased to announce that the current baseline of TDBC,
tagged '1.0b5' and bearing the ID, 46df70f083, is available.
This release includes what I believe to be functionally
complete versions of the TDBC base classes and tokenizer
(matching the versions on the Tcl HEAD), together with the
following three drivers:

tdbc::odbc - A bridge that allows connection to any ODBC-compliant
              database.  This module builds on Windows, and is
              expected to build on any Unix system with the 'unixodbc'
              package.

tdbc::sqlite3 - A connector that joins TDBC to SQLite3. This
                 connector is written in pure Tcl (using the 'sqlite3'
                 extension), and is expected to run anywhere that
                 SQLite3 runs.

tdbc::mysql - A connector that joins TDBC to MySQL. This connector
               demands headers and libraries for MySQL 5.1 or better.
               It is all-new C code, not directly derived from Artur
               Trzewik's fine 'mysqltcl' binding. It uses the MySQL
               prepared statement interface, so it is expected to be
               relatively immune to SQL insertion attacks, without
               depending on mysql_real_escape_string or relatives.

These modules are all obtainable as as single ZIP archive at
http://tdbc.tcl.tk/

All three of these modules can be built and installed on Unix
with a typical Posix toolchain, and on Windows with msys/mingw.

Obviously, more work needs to be done for TDBC to achieve world
domination.  Important further work that is needed:

(1) Revise the 'errorCode' lists returned by the various TDBC
     commands to make more sense with Tcl's new [try] command.
     This is a fairly mechanical project. Contact me directly
     if you're interested in taking it on, and I'll advise about
     what needs to be done.

(2) All three of these modules need Makefile.vc, for building
     with Visual Studio on Windows systems.

(3) Binary distributions for the various platforms need to be
     packaged.

(4) More drivers are needed!  I know that various people over
     the last few months have volunteered to work on drivers, but
     I haven't been maintaining a registry of who's doing what.
     I think that the project Wiki at tdbc.tcl.tk would be a
     good place to do that.  In particular, people have requested:

       - pgsql
       - Sql Server native API
       - Oracle

     and several less popular databases.

(5) Packaging advice is needed from downstream distributors,
     particularly as regards the package dependencies. The database
     drivers usually have complex dependencies; for instance,
     tdbc::sqlite depends at run time on TDBC itself, and on
     the 'sqlite3' Tcl extension. (Being a pure Tcl solution,
     it has no build-time dependencies.) tdbc::mysql depends
     on mysql 1.5 or better (built with threads), and this is
     a build-time dependency because it needs #include files
     and a link library.  Clearly, we don't want to bundle
     all the dependencies with Tcl itself.

Bugs and feature requests can be logged at http://tdbc.tcl.tk/
I welcome broader exposure of all three of these modules,
which while still 'experimental', should be considered as
being on track for release.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin