SYNERGY-E-NEWS
News and Updates for Synergy/DE Developers

November 2, 2012

 

Synergex International Corporation has new leadership

William Mooney promoted to president

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Pinning Synergy/DE applications in Windows 8

New utility gives quick access from single Windows tile

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Quiz

Synergy/DE pros, see if you can answer this question!

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twitter.com/synergyde
 

Synergex announces KitaroDB, a free NoSQL database for the next generation of applications

WinRT, Win32, and .NET already supported; other platforms to follow

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Synergy/DE 10: The version too big for a byte

Ensuring your development won't be affected

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Platform News

Read a selection of recent articles

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Synergex International Corporation has new leadership

William Mooney promoted to president

Synergex International Corporation announces the promotion of William Mooney to president of the company. Mooney succeeds longtime president Michele Wong, who will continue as Synergex’s CEO while focusing on the growth of Synergex subsidiary CleanWorld, as its president and CEO.

A 28-year veteran of Synergex, Mooney has spent the last several years as vice president and general manager of the company’s flagship business unit, Synergy/DE. “Bill has done an exemplary job as general manager in continuing to grow the business, provide exceptional customer service, manage expenses and produce consistent profits,” states Wong. “It is because of his outstanding leadership skills and his unwavering commitment to the success of Synergex that he has been promoted.”

As president, Mooney will work closely with his management team to provide strategy and direction in all  areas of the company; and he’ll continue to work with Synergex customers to help them to grow and be successful.  “Synergy/DE is an amazing suite of tools, backed by an incredible group of talented individuals who are responsible for its success,” states Mooney. “I feel fortunate to have been a part of the team responsible for advancing the product from a cross-platform business language to today’s extensive suite of OO development tools that rival any popular toolset today.”

In addition to continuing to develop Synergy/DE to meet evolving customer and industry requirements,  Synergex, under Mooney’s leadership, will be focusing on introducing components of the product suite to new markets. This has recently been done with KitaroDB, a repackaged version of Synergy/DE’s powerful database system, which is now being offered to Visual Studio developers.

Mooney concludes, “As our customers know, I’ve always strongly believed in our products and services and our ability to help customers move forward. I’m very excited about the opportunities I’ll have as president to help make our products and our customers even more successful.”

Synergex Announces KitaroDB, a free NoSQL database for the next generation of applications

WinRT, Win32, and .NET already supported; other platforms to follow

We are excited to announce the release of KitaroDB 1.0, a repackaged version of Synergy DBMS that brings native NoSQL to WinRT (the new Windows 8 UI), and also supports Win32, and .NET environments. With the release of KitaroDB, we’re making the database that has been driving enterprise Synergy applications for more than 25 years available to developers outside the Synergy community.

KitaroDB is a fast, efficient data store that supports key-value pairs as well as intrusive keys, and can be used by developers across Microsoft’s platforms. Support for other platforms, beginning with Windows Phone 8, will be available soon.KitaroDB is capable of thousands of operations per second, yet is small enough to fit on client devices, leaving resources available for the application that uses it. The easy-to-use API enables developers to spend their time programming application features, and not worrying about how to push their schemaless data into a rigid schema.

KitaroDB 1.0 features include:
- Intuitive interfaces for programmers using C#, VB, HTML5/JavaScript, C++ and C
- Support for large sector drives
- Minimal overhead, consuming less than a megabyte of memory resources
- A durable, on disk data store with a 100TB storage limit
- Asynchronous and synchronous operations
- Flexibility to be used as either a key-value store or with intrusive key access

With today’s launch of KitaroDB 1.0, Synergex has also released an open source application that’s powered by KitaroDB. “Baconography” is a Reddit client for Windows 8. Using KitaroDB’s ability to store data on-disk, Baconography is able to provide an excellent user experience regardless of the status of the Internet connection to Reddit. Baconography’s source is available on github.com, and the application has been submitted to the Windows Store.

Plans for future KitaroDB versions include support for Linux and other platforms, support for records larger than 64K, and a specialized server edition.

“We’re extremely excited to introduce KitaroDB,” states Roger Andrews, CTO at Synergex. “It lets developers incorporate local storage for applications that might otherwise fall over if Internet connections are lost. Plus, their local data stores are in the exact same format as they’d otherwise expect to use, which means a lot less coding, and a lot less room for error.”

Synergex previously launched KitaroDB v0.8 for WinRT applications to coincide with Microsoft’s September release of Visual Studio 2012. Today’s release coincides with Microsoft’s recent Windows 8 release and includes feature and performance improvements to the WinRT version, plus the addition of Win32 and .NET CLR support.
For more information, visit KitaroDB.com.



Pinning Synergy/DE applications in Windows 8

New utility gives quick access from single Windows tile

Windows 8 does away with the traditional Windows “Start” menu and instead uses a tiled Start screen that consists of tiled icons for built-in programs, such as Mail and Calendar, and for some applications you have installed.

For Windows 8, Synergy/DE version 10 installations will install one tile, and this will be for for the Workbench application. Start menu items, such as Synergy Utilities, Repository, and the DBA Utility, which were added by previous versions of Synergy/DE will not be added to the Start screen. You can navigate to any program by moving to the desktop (select the Desktop tile, or press the Windows key) and then using Windows Explorer.

To make things a little easier for Synergy users and developers, we have added a program, Synergy Control Panel (SYNCPL.EXE, located in the SynergyDE\dbl\bin directory), which gives you the ability to launch several Synergy utility programs. The programs you can access from Synergy Control Panel depend on what you have installed, and may include the following:

  • Synergy Configuration Program (32-bit)
  • Synergy Configuration Program (64-bit)
  • Synergy UI Toolkit Control Panel (32-bit)
  • Synergy UI Toolkit Control Panel (64-bit)
  • xfNetLink .NET Configuration
  • xfODBC DBA Utility

You can access the Synergy Control Panel  from the Windows Control Panel. If you would like to pin it to either the taskbar or Start screen, use Windows Explorer to navigate to SynergyDE\dbl\bin directory, right-click on the SYNCPL.EXE program, and select the option to pin it to either the taskbar and/or the Start screen.

For ease of use, you may want to pin other frequently used programs, such as the Synergy Configuration Program (SYNCONFIG.EXE). Desktop shortcuts can be created for developer tools, such as Repository, by setting the target path for dbr.exe, for example:

"C:\Program Files\Synergex\SynergyDE\dbl\bin\dbr.exe" rps:rps

Shortcuts can then be pinned to the taskbar or Start screen for easy access.



Synergy/DE 10: The version too big for a byte

Ensuring your development won’t be affected

Synergy/DE version 10 is coming soon. Along with the changes to support Rev 6 ISAM, Windows 8, multi-user Repository, and other new features, we’ve made some less newsworthy changes that could be just as important to your development as your upgrade to version 10.

These changes relate to the version number itself: 10 is our first two-byte version number. To prepare for this, we began analyzing our source code and published APIs over a year ago to identify changes we would need to make and changes you might need to make, depending on your use of Synergy version number strings. And in Synergy/DE 9.5.3, we enhanced our APIs to enable you to start making any necessary changes well in advance of the version 10 release. Use the information in this article to help you determine if the transition to a two-byte Synergy version number will affect your development.

During our analysis phase, we made sure that buffers used for version numbers were long enough to store two-byte versions, and we identified places where strings were compared against the version. Because our version strings are stored left-justified, we updated some version strings to use alphabetic letters for version 10 and higher, which ensures that string comparisons will continue to work as expected in deployed applications. For example, the compiler version defined by SYN_VER is A.1.1 for version 10. (If we instead changed it to 10.1.1, comparing this to 9.5.3 would result in 9.5.3 being evaluated as higher.) And because you may be passing SYN_VER to U_CHECKVERSION, U_MINVERSION, or U_PARSEVERSION, we modified these routines in version 10 to handle both digits and letters so that deployed code won’t break. Moving forward, however, we recommend that you modify your code to instead use a new define, SYN_VERSION, which is one byte longer. (SYN_VER and SYN_VERSION are defined in the distributed dbl.def file.)

Similarly, we updated the version argument to U_VERSION to return A.1.1 for version 10. And in 9.5.3 we added a second argument that allocated leading space (e.g., “ 9.5.3”) in preparation for version 10. We also made the first U_VERSION argument optional, so you don’t have to obtain both formats to get the new one. Be sure to update your code to use the new U_VERSION argument if needed.

If you use the Repository Subroutine Library and use the repository version ci_ver (in ddinfo.def) in a string comparison, you may need to change your code. In version 10 the ci_ver string starts with 1, so deployed applications could break since string comparison logic will not evaluate as expected. We recommend you modify your code to use U_PARSEVERSION instead.

For U_PARSEVERSION, note that if you pass a d1 for the version number argument, the return value will be truncated in version 10. We recommend passing an integer instead.

Finally, %VERSN returns the Synergy runtime version in a text string (e.g., “DBL/MS Windows Version v.r.m”). If you have code that parses the string for the version number and then uses the number in a string comparison against an earlier version, you may need to make changes to your comparison logic before moving to version 10.

We recommend that you review all logic in your application related to Synergy version strings before upgrading to version 10. Following the above recommendations now will help ensure that your transition to version 10 is a smooth one.


Quiz

What is the output of the following program?

namespace a
function fred, ^val
proc

    freturn 1    
end
endnamespace

namespace b
function fred, ^val
proc

    freturn 2
end
endnamespace

main
proc

    open (1,o,"TT:")
    writes(1,%string(%a.fred))     
end

a. "1"
b. "2"
c. this does not compile and link
d. this fails at runtime

Click to read the answer


Platform News

Windows

Installing Windows 8: the pain, the poetry, the pleasure
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33642_7-57542994-292/installing-windows-8-the-pain-the-poetry-the-pleasure/

Review: Visual Studio 2012 shines on Windows 8
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/review-visual-studio-2012-shines-windows-8-205971

Windows 8 cheat sheet
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232749/Windows_8_cheat_sheet?taxonomyId=89

Windows 7 malware infection rate soars in 2012
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232188/Windows_7_malware_infection_rate_soars_in_2012?taxonomyId=89

Review: Windows Server 2012 RTM
http://www.osnews.com/story/26503/Review_Windows_Server_2012_RTM

OpenVMS

OpenVMS: Reflections on the first 35 years
http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=12/10/29/7472983

Security Bulletin: HP Secure Web Server (SWS)
http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=12/10/11/0447907

UNIX

Penultimate version of 3.5.x Linux kernel released
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232700/Penultimate_version_of_3.5.x_Linux_kernel_released?taxonomyId=89

Linux Top 3: Red Hat Gets Certified, Wayland Hits 1.0 and Linux 3.7 Ramps Up
http://www.linuxplanet.com/news/linux-top-3-red-hat-gets-certified-wayland-and-linux-3.7-ramps-up.html