Wednesday 11 January 2012

Does Anybody Read This?

Welcome back peeps.  Another waste of time, storage and bandwidth.  So, what's been happening?

Private Project

Well, this project is moving ahead.  Got a deposit paid - which helped pay for a new set of tyres for the car.  It also means we are committed to finalising development.  This little project has taught me so much that I can use in my day job it's unbelievable.  Using Access 207 as a front-end with a MySQL 5 back-end is, well interesting.  As many queries as possible have been moved into Stored Procedures that are simply called from Access.  This has a few benefits:
  1. Any changes that are made can be applied to all clients at the same time - update, test and move into production and changes to the stored procedures and BAM!  All clients have a copy of the stored procedure (well, they call the SP on the server, but you get the idea).
  2. Routines that manipulate a lot of data run much quicker on the server than on the client.  
    1. For starters, you don't need to download the entire recordset onto the client for processing, then upload the changes.  
    2. The server also has more grunt to carry out this kind of work anyway.  
    3. And lastly, although Access does carry out some basic optimisation for saved queries, I think the MySQL server does a better job of mapping out stored procedure flow and optimising a lot better.
  3. Gives me a chance to learn MySQL and SQL better

We are looking at a February installation and running alongside the existing platform.  This is dependent on client giving go-ahead and final sign-off on the contract.  All up, should be a nice yearly bonus.  My regular tax return will more than cover the small income earned through this endeavor. 

iOS Development

Has been put on hold.  I'm currently working on learning PHP and advancing my skill set in BlackBerry/Java development. The BlackBerries now need to talk to the database server to obtain a list of clients in the users region.  Hence the PHP - I need to be able to write a web service to handle the communication.  Luckily I can be a bit 'sloppy' with this and not worry about authentication as the web service will not be made available on the internet.  Only devices on the LAN will have access and quite frankly, if there is a compromised machine on the LAN then it really doesn't make one bit of difference if I secure this web service or not.  Unsurprisingly, IIS is being a bitch and refusing to run PHP.  I did manage to get it running at some stage however something has broken and it isn't loading the PHP DLL when a PHP page is called.  Oh well, download and install WAMP on an unused desktop that doesn't get turned off and all is looking good!

Anyway, I'm going to stop there.  Nobody reads this anyway.