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Thoughts on the 14.1 plugin release

For the Xojo journal I wrote a few comments to the last plugin release. Maybe you missed them:

When Mac OS X 10.8 was released, I checked what is new and maybe worth to make a plugin. So I found new frameworks like EventKit, Social and Accounts and made plugins for them. But half way I tried them and noticed that they are 64bit only. Now with 10.9 I checked again and found the MapKit framework from Apple to be 64bit only. As you may know the 64bit support in Xojo will come not before Q1/2015.

Luckily I found an open source MapKit framework which replicates the APIs from Apple, but uses Google's service. That's fine for me as I can later add a switch to use either 64bit Apple framework or the open source framework with Google. So for now you can use maps in your Cocoa Mac apps with Google. Much better than simply loading maps in htmlviewer.

When Xojo cloud was released I was curious to see what apps run on the server. As you may know we have no shell access, so I needed a plugin to check for me what is running. And voilá we got a new LinuxProcessMBS class to list the processes and some details.

The reason for the new proxy functions is simple: Some admins in big companies want to have all traffic go through proxies and use PAC files to define what goes through proxy and what direct. Now I never understood while we should use a proxy like this. If they'd use a transparent proxy, no configuration would be needed at all and they could still filter content and monitor what people do in the office.

But to allow Xojo made apps to use proxy configuration scripts, we added classes for Mac and Windows. They provide details on the configured proxy for the system and also help with running those javascript code in PAC files.

In the SQL plugin we got improvements every few months. This time we had a simple idea to fix an issue with prepared statement parameters. Whenever the SQL changes with a new additional parameter, the indexes would change. So now we can name those placeholders and fill them in bind command with names. That is very useful and less trouble for you and me.
04 04 14 - 14:22