Ian Lewis' Blog

I came across this website called Zoho which has a lot of interesting web apps like Google's web apps. Google has Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Zoho has docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Google has Google notebook. Zoho has a notebook. Google has gmail. Zoho has Zoho mail. Google has... well you get the idea.

All that stuff is well and good but the thing that caught my eye was the Zoho creator and the Zoho DB & Reports. Granted, Google has it's own things like a neat little chart api(on the right) but nothing like Zoho's DB and integrated report creator that I know of. Google Base seems built for an entirely different purpose. Granted that the Zoho DB and Reports are not going to rival any enterprise reporting software but would provide you with an easy to use reporting tool for small to <the step above small (not medium)> sized databases.

Anyway, the possibilities seemed interesting for an online set of integrated applications like Zoho has. Especially the DB, App creator, and Spreadsheets but I'm sure you could think of powerful ways to integrate the other things like TODO and e-mail. The problem is that Zoho hasn't integrated these (yet?). The Zoho creator, though billed as a way to "Create Database Applications", is not integrated with the DB. When you create an app, and with it, a form and a view in the creator, the database and tables don't show up in the database app. *scratches head* Isn't integrating these two obvious? It would be cool to have an application with a database that you could then load in Zoho Database and create reports etc. But alas, the creator is a stand alone.

The integration issues combined with bugs in the creator when saving data, when saving text other than english, and when accessing using a Japanese phone, all are pretty much show-stoppers for me using it. It seems like it's so close, but missing some critical pieces. They may be adhering to the release early, release often philosophy and they are definitely sticking to the "release early" part. I just hope they stick to the "release often" part.

There is currently a bug in the current stable release of MDB2 (2.4.1) that breaks transaction support with MySQL databases. It seems to occur anytime the server cababilities are checked twice (This basically means that it occurs when creating multiple connections to the database).

After running into this bug I took a dive into the code for MDB2 and found that was caused by the use of a static variable that is used to determine if the capabilites were already checked or not, including whether transactions are supported or not. Basically you make one connection to the database and everything is fine, it checks the capabilities and finds that transactions are supported and sets a class member variable indicating this. However, when making the second connection, the server capabilities are checked in the new object. The member variable of the new object that specifies if transactions are supported defaults to false, but the function that actually checks the capabilities checks the static variable to see if they were already checked and skips checking again leaving the new connection object with transaction support set to false.

Seems like a silly oversight to me, but one that caused me a headache for a couple hours. I looked to see if I needed to submit a bug report and/or patch but it seems that someone has already done so. The change should be in the next stable version but I need to patch my currently running servers so that transaction support is enabled in the mean time.