Sorry but I couldn't resist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBvsBpgGbo

Michael,

> Sorry but I couldn't resist
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBvsBpgGbo

<vbg>

Uli

Hi Uli,

<< I have always appreciated Tim's work, but meanwhile it's hard to stay patient (at least for me).

EWB3 beta was already announced before Christmas in 2018 and I wonder if we are going to see it before Christmas 2019.

Just tired. >>

I understand.  The work that Tim does is absolutely amazing and I'm very grateful for all of his hard work.  The wait for EWB3, however, has been a very long one.  I know it's hard to be patient when the release date keeps shifting.

On the other hand, I feel Tim always has very good reasons for the shifting timeframes.  I believe EWB3 is going to be incredible when it's finally available - I think we're going to be very pleasantly surprised - so it should be the worth the rather lengthy wait.

I do sometimes worry for Tim in regards to the window of opportunity.  When EWB1 was released IMHO there wasn't really anything around like it.  As time races on a couple of competing products have emerged, although in my view they're still not anywhere close to EWB.  But that may not always be the case.  Chances are the competition will increase.  I just hope that EWB has the majority of the market before that happens.

= Steve

Steve Gill wrote:

>  As time races on a couple of competing products have emerged, although in my view they're still not anywhere close to EWB.  

It is indeed amazing to me - EWB is streets ahead of much of the mainstream from what I see. EWB 2 brought in the slightly complicated but easy once you have your head around it layout facility, and now I wish every system had it. When you see some other company putting out a "forms just like Delphi" and it is all absolute positioning still, I'm stunned. And the crazy Javascript frameworks where you have to link components to HTML manually is incredible in this modern world.

So EWB has a place in the market. Having moved my server side coding to C#, I wish it worked with that language, but it is still very productive and capable.

--

Matthew Jones

Steve,

<< I do sometimes worry for Tim in regards to the window of opportunity.  When EWB1 was released IMHO there wasn't really anything around like it.  As time races on a couple of competing products have emerged, although in my view they're still not anywhere close to EWB. >>

Which products are you referring to ? (just curious)  I've been trying to keep tabs on things, and so far I haven't seen anything emerge that resembles EWB (with a separate IDE, etc.).

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Uli,

<< I have always appreciated Tim's work, but meanwhile it's hard to stay patient (at least for me). >>

With regard to EWB 3, we're not asking anyone to do anything they don't want to do.  Everyone is free to "move on to greener pastures" if they're not happy with how much time it is taking, and I've talked with several customers that have done just that.  There are no hard feelings about customers doing what they need to do.

I cannot understate that the time it takes to do a project like this is absolutely enormous, and the entire endeavor is a big gamble for us.  We've taken quite a hit, both personally in terms of the sheer amount of time that I've dedicated to the project, and financially due to me not working on anything else for such a long period of time (we're down about $25K in revenue this year alone - I could have made more money this year working a regular, run-of-the mill software developer job).  I wouldn't do something like this if I didn't think it was necessary for the product to move forward.  It would be much easier to just tinker around the edges with incremental improvements.  Plus, it's really, really hard to keep telling my wife "it's almost done..." over and over and not feel like I'm full of s**t.

<< EWB3 beta was already announced before Christmas in 2018 and I wonder if we are going to see it before Christmas 2019. >>

You will, and I've already explained why EWB 3 did not come out in January 2019 in posts here on the forums (and also in a blog post).  During testing in December of 2018, the AST-walking interpreter performance was not sufficient for the server-side application usage, and did not have a future for other purposes, so it had effectively reached its end of life and needed to be replaced with something more robust and performant.  Since January 2019, I've rewritten most of the core of the product, from the compiler to the interpreter to the code editor/source code management (the compiler/interpreter/source code management alone is ~50K lines of code).   EWB is now positioned well to carry on for the next 4-5 years without requiring any major revisions at all.

I haven't detailed this publicly before, but hopefully it will give everyone an idea of where the time went:

- I started EWB 3 with a pretty full effort in August, 2017 (this was late by a few months).  The initial work was re-doing the IDE to update its look, streamline its usability, and modify it for dual usage with client and server applications.

- I was diagnosed with TOS (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) in early September, 2017 and it took a couple of weeks to completely recover from the surgery.  I was back on the EWB 3 IDE by October, 2017.

- My mother passed away in late November, 2017, so I had to spend a better part of December, 2017 finalizing her affairs in conjunction with my normal workload, so the EWB 3 IDE work was spotty during that month.

- In February, 2018, I had to go back in for a follow-up surgery, and lost a couple of more weeks.

- I then had to stop work on the EWB 3 IDE to concentrate on EDB 2.28 and the global file I/O buffering feature that was being included in that release.  That ended up taking most of the spring and summer to write/test/debug and get into production.  I was only able to work on the EWB 3 IDE occasionally during that time period.

- Starting in late summer 2018, I was back on the EWB 3 IDE and was able to finish it up by December, 2018.

- Early 2019 is when the above-mentioned compiler/interpreter re-write started, and here we are.

For the record, I'm perfectly healthy (still) and the surgeries were a "life blip" due to a birth defect (cervical rib) that I wasn't aware that I had.   But, at any rate, that's where the time went.  Most of the bad estimates have been due to a) unforeseen circumstances, b) time spent on DBISAM/ElevateDB, or c) extra work I didn't know was going to be necessary and, therefore, couldn't possibly know to include in my estimate.  For example, the external native code interfaces for the compiler alone took about a month and a half longer than expected to get debugged and working right because a lot of the existing architecture broke down when the external bindings/calls had to work across DLL boundaries.  I'm aware of the general requirements with such features, but it's almost impossible to get right the exact amount of time it's going to take until you start coding it and realize where all of the "gotchas" are located.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Rick,

<< Thanks for the update Tim. I like the idea of a very fast compiler but I would be happy to sacrifice compilation speed for a smaller runtime. Is this something you'll be looking at in the future? I do have some users on slow connections and whilst 40K is fairly small every byte counts. >>

40K is going to have a negligible effect on the performance.  Once you go above 500K, you're going to get a performance hit on the initial application load no matter what, especially on mobile.  However, remember that this is only a one-time hit, and the application will be cached locally afterward.

<< Also, does this release bring any performance improvements when creating forms containing a large number of components? I sometimes want to display multiple TGrids with several columns each on a single form and this appears to affect form creation performance. >>

What is a large number ?  And no, there are virtually zero component/control changes on the client side.  EWB 3, as I've always said, is about adding server-side application capabilities to EWB and getting the IDE prepared so that the necessary productivity improvements can be made (code editing, etc.).

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim,

<<With regard to EWB 3, we're not asking anyone to do anything they don't want to do.  Everyone is free to "move on to greener pastures" if they're not happy with how much time it is taking, and I've talked with several customers that have done just that.  There are no hard feelings about customers doing what they need to do
>>

After a long time of supporting (and enjoying) EWB it's just disappointing to read that. No further comments.

Uli

Uli,

<< After a long time of supporting (and enjoying) EWB it's just disappointing to read that. No further comments.  >>

I don't think you're understanding what I was trying to say.

If I can't control how long the project is taking (which I can't), how would you expect me to handle customers needing something sooner ?  The only option is for them to use something else until I have completed the project.  At that point, they can check the new version out and see if there are any newer, upcoming projects that can use it.

Is that clearer ?

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Hi Tim,

<< Which products are you referring to ? (just curious)  I've been trying to keep tabs on things, and so far I haven't seen anything emerge that resembles EWB (with a separate IDE, etc.).  >>

Nothing that comes close to EWB.  I was referring to that Smart Mobile thing and the TMS product, but they're not even in the same league.

= Steve