SQLEditor 3.0 is ready!
I’ve feel like I’ve been working on this for ages, so I’m really happy that it’s now ready.
The most visible change is the new user interface, which has been merged into a single window. Single window interfaces are something that I wasn’t initially convinced by, I liked palettes and life was good. But since then, I’ve come to see the benefits of the single window. Keeping the panels in a relatively fixed position means that you know where they are. There’s also less busy-work managing the panels.
The tradeoff is obviously that it’s less flexible and on a large screen it can lead to more and larger mouse movements. Feedback has generally been good on this, I don’t think there have been any complaints (so far). If you have an opinion on this please do send in comments!
For me the most interesting new feature is the Javascript plugin system. Export dialects can now be written in Javascript. You can even edit them while SQLEditor is running and see the results immediately.
The new plugin system grew out of the report generating code (also new in 3.0) which was targeting html and using a javascript template language. But then I started looking at this code and realised that there was no reason that export dialects couldn’t be in Javascript as well. The difference between a report and an export is minimal. Both take a data structure and return a string (or possibly a file).
So far all of the built in dialects use native code, but my eventual plan is to convert them to javascript too.
Early code for my own javascript version of the SQLite dialect is already up on Github and further progress is planned for this.
There are lots of other improvements in SQLEditor 3 and I hope to write further about them soon.
Or see for yourself 🙂
SQLEditor 3 Download (58MB zip)