News/Changes
Follow JMDB development progress on Twitter!
2010-12-23
Merry X-Mas!
I'm sorry to say that there won't be the final JMDB v1.40 under the Christmas tree.
There have been more changes then planned after the pre-release 1 which prevented
me from releasing anything until now. There are still a few bugs I need to hunt down first.
As even non of the beta testers got a new version you can assume that it failed my
personal standards to give away even the latest builds with the known bugs.
But it's not as bad as it sounds. The v1.40pre1 is working very well until I
release a new version. Also keep in mind that I finally started to kick off JMDB v2 and
moved the JMDB v1.xx source from the old Visual Age Java (VAJ) into an SVN source repository
and now use Eclipse for the development (VAJ is the predecessor of Eclipse).
For JMDB v2 I only did some prototyping as of now but the Better Swing Application Framework (BSAF) still looks
promising. There are some minor issues with their way of using property files (e.g.
for the GUI translation) and also the startup of the application GUI, but I should be able
to solve them. Important is to create a good base to build upon. I plan to show something
in about 6 month and release the final JMDB v1.40 before that.
You also may have noticed that IMDb had some problems from 2010-11-12 until 2010-12-09.
The IMDb list files where not exported or not uploaded to the FTP servers. After I contacted
the IMDb support they fixed it in a couple of days. Internally there are some serious changes
at IMDb regarding the website and features. Let's hope that the new features won't break
the text files again. There is a new plan to add links into the plots/biographies which
we have already seen some years back and which have been removed mostly. Now it comes again
to haunt us. ;)
Let's see what happens in the next few month!
Finally a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you around the world. Let's all hope that I finally get some time off now to fix the remaining JMDB bugs.
2010-10-31
Switching hoster has been initiated... and progress report on JMDB
When you can read this message it seems switching the hoster completed successfully. There will be some additional changes e.g. the download files will be moved to this account, the date of changes will be updated automatically using Server Side Includes (SSI) and so on.
There has been some progress regarding the helper application I'm working on which will be based on the JMDB v2 codebase. I also started testing GUI frameworks for JMDB v2. Currently it's the Better Swing Application Framework (BSAF). I'm not yet sure if I use it but so far it seems to be a good choice. The downside is I will have to use Java6 (1.6.*) while I would prefer to stick with Java5 (1.5.*) for the moment. For JMDB v1.40 I'm still fixing bugs introduced with the latest internal changes. I also moved the code into my SVN repository and will switch from IBM VAJ to Eclipse shortly. With that change I'll also have to change some minor parts of the GUI code (outdated Swing components like that used for the About JMDB window). At least this isn't really an issue.
2010-10-12
Yes, the project is still alive...
As I get some mails lately asking if the project is still alive, here is the answer:
YES, it is but work to earn money, additional secret other projects as well as life itself sometimes brings the progress down to a full stop.
I've been away almost the complete September so nothing happend to the code.
Before you are even more concerned because the page is not accessible in the near future here is the reason. The domain will be moved to a new hoster which will cause a short downtime (max 2 days; hopefully only some hours).
2010-05-14
Again some updates on the development of JMDB v1.40
As you can see above I added a link to Twitter where I post updates on the development progress. As those are only small changes there are several tweets per week while I update the news section several times a year. To know exactly what happens you should follow the Twitter feed jmdbdev (just click the link above).
Now we can look at the JMDB v1.40 pre2 progress:
- Added support for sound-mix.list.
- Added support for soundtracks.list.
- Fixed bug in biographies.list that prevented line-breaks.
- Changed import of goofs.list and trivia.list to remove blank lines.
- Changed output for listings so a bullet character is used instead a "-" or "*". This improved the readability.
- Changed output for genre and keywords into comma separated list of words.
- Reduced memory usage on import (plots, quotes, biographies, movie-links).
- Changed internal database table structure for:
- production-companies
- color-info
- technical
- language
- distributors
- locations
- Added experimental support to display images (the filename schema will change) of movies/persons as you can see below. The images need to be stored in the subdirectory "imagerepository" of the JMDB installation (Supported formats: JPG, PNG and GIF).
- Started to change the order of items shown in the detail window (only movies).
- Some other minor changes...
Screenshot of the "experimental" image display function (JMDB development version 2010-04-20)
As most work has been completed, only the MySQL fallback mode plus some bugfixing need to be done before JMDB v1.40 pre-release 2 will go into public testing. The feedback on the current development version is very good.
2010-04-01
No april fools' joke...JMDB v1.40 pre-release 1 is coming today... has been released!
Well I guess you can't believe it but it's true. I've updated the download section with the all the changes of the JMDB 1.40 development done in the last years.
There are still a few things missing:
- The fallback mode for full text search on MySQL if your search word is to short (≤3) is not yet included.
- Support for the soundtracks.list(.gz) is not yet in included.
- One new problem brought to my attention two weeks ago and which also effects MySQL
(but only if you select 'MySQL >3.23.28' or
'MySQL ≥4.0.0' from the drop-down list in the JMDB-Setup dialog).
The problem is an incredible long title of a series from Japan. As the older MySQL versions do not support that long VARCHARs and JMDB ignores the Exception thrown the internal movieid is wrong. So every data lookup starting at a special point (after 1/3 of the movies) returns the wrong data, as the wrong row is fetched from the database.
A solution is on it's way but as most users moved to MySQL 5.x it's only a minor issue. The next version will include a fix...and this time it won't take that long to get the release out of the door.
There is something else I want to let know. Since a month or so I use Twitter for the
development updates as it's easier to throw out some small bits of progress on the development
this way.
If you want to follow use this link: Java Movie Database (JMDB) twitter development feed...
2010-02-15
Update on the development progress
Finally a new life sign... :)
after a bad start into the new year with a failing harddrive (bad blocks, so
I couldn't start the OS) that slowed me down together with one 66h work week in mid January,
I was finally able to complete some of the work.
The best news is that on Wednesday last week JMDB v1.40 pre1 has been send to some beta users. After I finally have my E-Mail application reinstalled after the harddrive failure, some more testers will get access to the new version shortly. When I don't get seriously bugreports this version will be available shortly to everyone (7-10 days). The only thing I'm going to update are the MovieCollection example files, as pre1 currently contains outdated files.
The enhancements and new features added since December 2009:
- Around Christmas I added the full text search for MySQL and PostgreSQL. At first I
wasn't sure how good the MySQL implementation would work out, because the text
search feature only works with MyISAM but not InnoDB which normally is used and
also supportes transactions. The speed improvement for MySQL and PostgreSQL is
very good but will still improve when I finally complete my backend changes
(connection pooling,...). In case you don't remember the speed improvement for
the plain search here are the old results using (I)LIKE:
- Actor (name) search: 2800-times faster (5.6 sec down to 2.5 msec)
- Movie (title) search: 1000-times faster (15.0 sec down to 15.3 msec)
- The SQL search tab is currently put on hold because of some Java Swing problems I wasn't able to solve yet.
- I cleaned some code parts and added better error handling at several parts of the code
- For other enhancements I made since JMDB v1.36 look in the news of 2009! Most are speed enhancements (import and with the text search also query speed improvments) and some are additional checks for the IMDb errors that showed up a lot last year.
2010-01-02
Happy new year!
