TeraScript Users,
As we evolve the platform, it becomes necessary to change some fundamental aspects to provide a better product or keep up with current technology. Our decision to focus on Java as our development platform was one of these choices, driven mostly from the inactivity in C++ projects which help us extend the functionality of the platform. Today I'm announcing that we will be phasing out support for ODBC in the next few releases. There are three main reasons for this decision: 1) While ODBC support is robust on Windows, the Linux and OS X platforms support only minimal ODBC features and with a significant learning curve to the end user. 2) Since our products are now Java based, and the JDBC to ODBC driver is no longer supported, included, or functional, it's difficult to interact with ODBC data sources. 3) JDBC now has a feature set that is superior to ODBC. Our applications can learn more about the data sources they are connecting to through JDBC. A little more about those points: My first point mainly speaks to how ODBC is an integral part of Windows, but an add-on on other platforms, some of which (OS X in particular) no longer include it by default and make it difficult for the end user to install and manage. By switching to JDBC, we level the playing field. Updated TAFs will hold a JDBC configuration and will work on any platform, regardless of environment and how that environment is configured. It won't be necessary to make changes to your OS settings (Windows Data Sources control panel, Linux odbc.conf) nor will it be necessary to alter the jdbc.ini file in the TeraScript Server installation. TAFs and TCFs will retain all of the necessary information to create a JDBC connection and will simply work. The second point is regarding the use of the JDBC to ODBC driver which was added to the Java platform as a stop-gap measure back in Java 1.1. That driver was never officially supported, and today it is sometimes not included (OS X, Java 8) or doesn't function properly (64-bit JVM and MS SQL Server). No one is going to support this software and we must move away from using it. My last point is about the feature set of JDBC. You may not know this, but Microsoft actually stopped development on ODBC back in the 90s. In 1997, ODBC 3.5 was released and that was the last release of the spec (and management software) until Windows 7 in 2009, which came with ODBC 3.8. This dozen year gap in development meant that users looking to get more out of their database connectivity looked to the evolving JDBC standard. JDBC 4.x (the current spec) contains a significant amount of well standardized information about the database it's connecting to, the environment it's executing in, and the connection itself. As we improve our platform, TeraScript will use this information to create better queries and improvement performance, stability and security. All major databases now offer a JDBC driver, most of which are JDBC 4.0 compliant, supporting the full range of functionality. JDBC is now as fast as ODBC, and it will provide a tighter integration to TeraScript so that retrieved data retains its proper type. What to expect: TeraScribe 7.1 will drop support for using ODBC to introspect a database. All data sources in TeraScribe will be setup with JDBC. You will still have the option to provide ODBC credentials for TeraScript Server to use. Users on OS X know that this is how TeraScribe has always worked for you. TeraScribe 7.1 will offer some improvements to help you build your JDBC connection URL and to easily update all the data source information in a TAF at once. Migration will not be necessary, you will only need to update database actions as you modify them. TeraScript Server 8.0 will drop support for ODBC. Version 8 is a complete rewrite in Java and as such will not use ODBC in any way. Migration will again not be necessary, however there is a new configuration variable which allows you to map a data source name to a JDBC connection. For applications which use ODBC, this variable will need to be set appropriately. For users who must have access to ODBC, we are planning on supporting at least one bridge technology. One such option is made by Easysoft which you can read about here: http://www.easysoft.com/products/data_access/jdbc_odbc_bridge Please feel free to ask, either publically or privately, any questions you may have about this transition. Comments and suggestions are also welcome. Regards, Robert Tronics Software ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [email protected] with "unsubscribe terascript-talk" in the body.
