Wednesday, December 23, 2009

News from the front

We decided to postpone the port until the main development of the current version was over, probably in the second semester of 2010. The next major version will be written entirely in Lazarus, using our updated Code Generator with the updated Data Model -- that's being upgraded to support the forthcoming features.

The current version is written in Delphi 7 on a Windows XP virtual machine and runs smoothly under Wine at 100+ Ubuntu boxes. There's a need for a Windows version too, as some customers are still Microsoft-only. Even the customers that moved to Linux still have some Windows boxes for some specific tasks (like Internet Banking).

There's a small module that's been written in Lazarus to test the Persistence Framework and the overall development and deployment. We had to set up ANOTHER virtual machine, this time with Ubuntu 32 bit, to build the application. We need to compile 3 times: Windows XP, Ubuntu 32 and Ubuntu 64. I've tried to set up a cross compiler but it was easier to use another VM.