By Paul Rony on 8/6/2006 11:36 AM

This announcement is probably a bit premature, but we have SplendidCRM running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES).  We’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks, ever since the great folks on the Mono team created a VMware image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) with a stable version of Mono and MonoDevelop.

 

Our first instinct was to copy the entire SplendidCRM project to SLED and recompile under MonoDevelop.  This worked very well, with MonoDevelop being able to convert a Visual Studio 2003 project into its own format.  Mono and MonoDevelop are incredible products and we were thrilled to see SplendidCRM running on a Linux platform.

 

There were a couple of things that we needed to fix in SplendidCRM, such as correcting the case on any images or files.  SplendidCRM is pretty tight, so there were only a couple of images that needed to be corrected.  We also needed to alter the way we initialize the culture settings as values like the CurrencyDecimalSeparator...

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By Paul Rony on 7/19/2006 10:18 AM

SplendidCRM 1.2 is now in public beta. The final release date will not be set until we can gauge the initial reaction to the public beta, but it is safe to assume that the final release will be toward the end of August 2006.



 

SplendidCRM 1.2 has added the following features:

    1) Full .NET 2.0 Framework and Visual Studio 2005 support

    2) Access Control Lists

    3) Reporting module using ReportViewer

    4) Preview of Contracts, Products and Quotes modules

 

In addition to the SplendidCRM 1.2 features, we were also able to release builds for Oracle, DB2 and MySQL on the same day.  Not a bad accomplishment if I do say so myself.

 

All of the database platforms we support are running on a single demo server.  The interesting thing is that the server is still very fast even though it is hosting the web server as well as the four database servers. 

 

For those of you who are interested, the demo hardware is as follows:

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By Paul Rony on 6/30/2006 11:47 PM

We have been looking for an alternative to SourceForge as a place to host SplendidCRM.  Our wait has seemed to pay off as Microsoft has just announced CodePlex.  http://www.codeplex.com

"CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source .NET developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.0 technology and Visual Studio Team System on the back end. CodePlex is open to the public free of charge."

 

By Paul Rony on 6/20/2006 8:06 AM

It has been a while since my last entry.  I have been working so hard on the reporting module that I simply could not spare the cycles.  In any case, progress is good and we hope to have a beta release at the beginning of July.

The SplendidCRM Reporting module will use the Report Definition Language (RDL) that Microsoft created a few years ago.  RDL is an XML-based specification.  This is going to provide unsurpassed flexibility when it comes to report generation.  SplendidCRM will have a reporting module similar to that of SugarCRM, but it will also have the ability to import and export a report in RDL.

Microsoft has indicated that they will release Reporting Services as part of SQL Server Express, which suggests that there will soon be a free report designer. 

Eventually, we should be able to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with the reports stored on the server, but we will not do so on our first release.

 

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By Paul Rony on 5/3/2006 1:59 PM

We have just completed development on the ACL system.  ACL is a critical component of any CRM, so we are pleased to be able to offer it so soon after the release of our 1.0 product.

If you are interested in a preview, please send me an email and I will see if we can included you in our private/internal beta testing.  Otherwise, look for a public beta in the next two weeks.

 

By Paul Rony on 4/21/2006 1:56 AM

We were making great progress porting SplendidCRM to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.0, right up until the Sybase provider failed. 

The hard part is usually converting the SQL scripts to the Sybase format.  It was a bit painful writing SQL functions in Java, but we did it.  And we resigned ourselves into accepting that Sybase does not allow stored procedures to accept a text field as an input.  But it is always frustrating when we have to debug another company's product.

The Sybase ADO.NET driver has a problem when parameters are used through the IDbDataParameter common interface. An Input/Output parameter throws an exception when the Value parameter is accessed after procedure execution.

We have posted a bug on the Sybase site, but we are not optimistic that they will fix the problem any time soon.  Until they fix the bug, we cannot continue.

 

By Paul Rony on 3/22/2006 10:47 PM

While working on a component that will allow the SplendidCRM installation utility to update an existing database, we ran across an obscure Oracle bug.  Here is the error:

            PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" when expecting one of the following:     return

 

The error prevented all of our functions in Oracle to compile fine, but be marked as Invalid.  This had a cascading effect of causing our views in Oracle to generate an compiler error stating that a dependent function was invalid.

 

After hours of research and experimentation, we narrowed the problem down to the use of the carriage-return line-feed pair (CRLF) that is common to text files used on the Windows platform.  Whereas the rest of the world generally treats the CRLF pair as whitespace, Oracle does not.

 

The solution was to simply replace CRLF with LF before creating executing the scripts in Oracle.

 

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By Paul Rony on 3/6/2006 11:08 PM

On March 6, 2006, SugarCRM officially acknowledged the threat posed by SplendidCRM. It has done so by deleting all posts that reference or mention SplendidCRM on their forums.

We could not think of a better way to be acknowledged as worthy adversary.

As we bow to show mutual respect, we simply say to John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, "thanks".

By Paul Rony on 3/1/2006 12:13 AM

Here is the quote from their web site:

"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

We are currently testing against Oracle 10g Release 2, so we are not expecting any additional development effort.  We will, however, need to create a new VMware instance and regression test against XE.

It is a good thing we are developing a regression testing tool, because we have a bunch of databases to support:

SQL Server 2000 SQL Server 2005 Oracle Database 9i Oracle Database 10g Oracle Database XE IBM DB2 Express-C MySQL 5 We would add Ingres to the list, but they do not support User-Defined Functions.

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By Paul Rony on 2/23/2006 4:19 PM

We are hoping that the hefty installation requirements will not limit its use.  The worst part is all of the license agreements that you must navigate through during installation. 

 

SplendidCRM Plug-in for Outlook 2003 is almost identical to the plug-in from SugarCRM, but adds the ability to use Windows Authentication when communicating with SplendidCRM.

 

The only disappointing point is that, for compatibility purposes, we use the same SOAP interfaces as designed by the SugarCRM team.  I use the word disappointing because only a PHP developer would be satisfied by sending or receiving a record in the form of a 2-dimentional array of strings.  SOAP is an incredibly flexible and powerful transport with the ability to use strong data types, yet we are stuck storing everything in an array of strings.

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