It's disappointing to see the Advantage Database Server (ADS) move its development state to End of Life. I'm sure many other developers share the same views. Now that we have reached this point, the question is, what can we do to move forward?
We can ask the XSharp team if they can obtain the source code for ADS and update it, but this will be time-consuming and not particularly fun.
We can ask the XSharp team to initiate a new project that would replace ADS, enabling fewer code changes to the applications when they are updated
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We can ask the XSharp team to develop an object that you can use to access any Back End Data Server, which hopefully reduces the amount of code changes required to upgrade to the new Data Server object.
The last choice would be to rewrite your application to use a more modern database backend. This would not require the XSharp team to stop what they are working on to do this.
Hi Richard,
you can be sure that Robert has tried to reach out SAP to obtain the source and the distribution right, but they (SAP) don't agreed.
Replacing ADS with a new project is a really hard thing to do, and first of all I have my doubts that it the X# team has the resources to do that in a short time (don't forget that there is not only the server on Windows and Linux, but also the support for the ADT table format, the drivers for many platforms including ADO and the SQL engine), and then I do not think there would be enough market to pay the investments.
The same is true for the 3rd option: developing all the drivers and making the entire software working like ADS IMHO is not possible because it would require a sequential database backend.
The only viable option in my eyes is to develop software that helps migrating your application to a new database platform - and it is what I'm doing also for my VO applications: I have developed a X# COM module that accesses a PostgreSQL server and has a dataserver derived class based on the ArrayServer and filled from SQL, so I can migrate my DBF based applications with a minimum amount of work.
Wolfgang
Wolfgang Riedmann
Meran, South Tyrol, Italy
wolfgang@riedmann.it
https://www.riedmann.it - https://docs.xsharp.it
Were there any updates on the SQL driver that would support Postgres using DBF syntax that Robert was working on as that was what I was waiting for as far as an upgrade path with the smallest possible amount of re-coding?
My choice was option number four. I'm using an object written by Robert, which behaves like a DBServer object but accesses ADO.NET in the backend. You know the SQL_Classes. It is fast, and I haven't come across anything that would make me want to stop using it.
