Feature Focus: Business Rules Scripting

Today, we’ve released a whole bunch of cool stuff, that vaguely focuses around the Business Rules Scripting feature in Data Abstract and Relativity Server (and incidentally one of my favorite features in DA, at this time).

For one, we’ve shipped a round of brand new “interim” releases for Data Abstract (and also RemObjects SDK). These releases incrementally build upon our “Spring 2011” release from March, and have a lot of fixes and enhancements to scripting support and Relativity. Different from our usual release methodology, these builds really focus on scripting stuff only, and were developed on a separate branch from those where we’re moving towards our next “Summer 2011” release due later this year.

This allowed us to really concentrate on what we wanted in this update, and not have to worry about side effects of other feature development, or even other bug fixes and enhancements that were happening on the main line. (Our switch to git for all our version control needs, last year, has really made this new development model possible, as the kind of branching we’re doing these days would really not have been feasible with SVN.)

The new releases are available for all three editions: .NET, Xcode and Delphi.

As part of the new releases, we’re now also making standalone versions of Relativity Server available for download as well, including an installer for Windows and a .app bundle for Mac OS X. These should come in handy for deploying Relativity Server on your servers without installing DA or manually copying files around. Another good use for these is for developers who want to run Relativity on a platform other than the edition of DA they own. For example, a pure Mac developer might want to install Relativity on his Windows server.

To really help you get going with scripting (did I mention how excited we are about this feature?), we’ve also published a brand new video on RemObjects TV, as well as a preview chapter from the book that Jim and I are writing about “Enterprise and Cloud Database Development for iOS with data Abstract for Xcode”. (The Book is targeted at DA/Xcode, but the scripting chapter applies pretty much to all editions of Data Abstract.)

But is that all?

No, that’s not all. To round things off, we have also taken our Server Explorer for Mac and made it available on the Mac App Store.

Now, Server Explorer (and Schema Modeler — they are part of the same app) for Mac are included with Data Abstract for Xcode, so if you’re a DA/Xcode user, there’s really no need to go out and get it from the App Store. But we believe Server Explorer for Mac will also be of interest to other users – for example developers on DA/.NET and DA/Delphi who use Macs for part of their workflow and want to take advantage of being able to administer Relativity Servers and create schemas from the Mac. We think a standalone license of Server Explorer will also be useful for DBAs, as well as for developers who want to use Relativity Server to expose data via OData (without using Data Abstract on the client at all).

So.

So, as you can see, we’ve been busy. I hope you like the new stuff we have for you today, and I’m looking forward to your feedback on it — here in the comments or on RemObjects Connect (which is worth a separate blog post, one of these days).

Also, if you are attending WWDC in two weeks, make sure to look me up so we can have a chat (send me a tweet to @dwarfland, if you can’t find me).