What I am doing...

Well, I am working very hard in these month, mainly because I would like to finish some new products before REAL Words 2006.

I am finishing the new SQLiteManager, it is a complete rewrite, with a new interface, new powerful features and really much much more new things ...

I am writing the documentation for a new RB plugin, SQLite3ProfessionalPlugin. It is a plugin that gives you full low level access to sqlite 3 databases, so no Database subclass or RecordSet classes and something similar (even if is easy to create a wrapper for these classes in RB). It is a near 1 to 1 map to the sqlite3 C api, so you can have access to the progress handler routine or to the sqlite3 virtual machine and so on.

My audience are professional database users, that, for example, can take advantage of the sqlite3 progress handler routine to give time to other threads or to update the RB UI, or that can use the sqlite3 virtual machine to build a query system with 0 delay time (and very low memory requirements) even if millions of rows are returned from a query.

With the new plugin you can also write sqlite functions directly in RB, so for example you can write a query like:

"SELECT my_function(*) FROM table WHERE ..."

where my_function is an RB routine!

Stay tuned for new announcements...

Game Engine

I am working on a new multiplatform game engine, prerequisites are speed and win/osx support. I'll use OpenGL and SDL with C/C++ for this project.

I have found that the combination of my OpenGLPlugin and RealBasic is great to build very quickly tools for my game engine.
For example I am developing an obj loader/renderer for artists (so they can see in real time what they are doing) and a very complex terrain editor that I think it could became a world editor in the near future.

OpenGLPlugin rocks and the preemptive thread support that I have added to my plugin really help a lot in order to have smooth animations. (Well, I know that RS officially said that it isn't possible to use preemptive threads inside RB but I have found a trick that works really well).

We'll start a new company for game development, its web site (now empty) will be www.aliengarage.com.
More news in the near future...

Adobe Lightroom and Lua

This morning I read a news that shocked me ... well just a little shock from a developer point of view :-)

The software is Adobe Lightroom and the news is that it is driven by 100,000 lines of Lua code! (This represent about 40% of its total code).

Well, if you don't know Lua, this link can help and if you want a better blog entry about this topic this is another link for you.

I admit that maybe I have underestimate the power of Lua, but it seems that Mark Hamburg from Adobe really know how to reveal its power.

Eating fish...

There is a really nice place, very near from where I live, where fish is really cooked in a great way.

It is more than a simple restaurant, it is a country club, with swimming pool, tennis courts, houses and a lot more, it is really a very relaxed place in Summer time. But in Winter time :-) there is this really great restaurant, where Giuly and I used to go quite often. Last Saturday I have taken some pictures ... so I can now share this "sweet" place with you.





More at its web site (it seems to works only the Italian version).
So, after a pizze at Giogo, you could have a dinner at Lavadera, they are just 5 minutes away from my home ... so, give me a call when you are here ;-)

Castle again, my photos...

Giuly and I have really had a great time in the Castle.
Everything, from the room to the restaurant was really good.



I have taken a lot of photos from the castle, mainly because I can use them as base textures for my new game :-)
Here is it some of them.

Enjoy!

... and yes, there was also a frightening ghost in the Castle :-)