Angus Thinks…

I’ve been working recently on integrating a registration system into SQLEditor (sorry).

Unfortunately I kind of need to make some money out of my software and so people have to pay for it. I really wish this wasn’t the case but sadly it is.

So I now have an online store powered by swreg. If you visit the SQLEditor page you will now see a couple of purchasing options in the right column and further options are an a subsequent screen. It looks fairly close to the rest of the site and swreg offers better fraud prevention than paypal, particularly for credit cards.

The complexities of integrating everything together are quite great, which suprised me a bit. I was hoping for something easy, but it required a lot of steps to get everything pretty much working.

• Sign up to online store
• Add products
• Create templates for shopping basket
• Create serial number system
• integrate serial number system into application and online store

Although I won’t need to do this for any future software that I develop. Most of it was a one-off cost.

One oddity is that the serial number code is written in ANSI C. This is a bit odd, because most of the code that I have been writing recently has been either Objective C, Java or PHP. But ANSI C proved to be the best way of using the same codebase for both the server and client side components.

Hopefully lots of people will love and therefore buy the licenses.

I’ve recently been trying to write a serial number system for SQLEditor. I’m also looking for a new name for it. It was pointed out that the current name is generic and difficulty to pronounce, plus there is already at least one other “SQLEditor” out there already. Suggestions are welcome!

But back to the serial number thing. If I could remember more of the maths that I learnt at university I would be happier, but as I tend to do I had forgotten most of the stuff that I don’t use, retaining only the bits I do use (Vectors primarily, plus some other stuff).

Obviously serial number values end up in base 36 (0-9, A-Z), but other than that the problem occurred on how exactly to represent them. I need to have a link between the username and the serial number because that’s one of the methods implemented to discourage copying. If you see someone else’s name on the thing.

I’m currently looking at a graphic convertor like delay (it will wait 20 or 30 seconds at startup after the trial period is ended) rather than a complete lockout. Because I think (a) it’s nicer to do it that way and (b) it offers people a chance to experience the feature set even after 30 days have expired.

One thing I have noticed is that there are very few descriptions of how serial number systems actually work, probably to prevent people reverse engineering them and creating generators.

Of course the most secure system is one that receives a license key directly from a server, but I think that could be too intrusive. I guess we’ll see how well the first version works out.

New features for Beta 7 include “crows-feet” style referential cardinality indication and a new way of exporting foreign keys; following a suggestion they will be placed after the tables as soon as I write the code anyway, the parser is already capable, but the exporter is not.

Finally Beta 7 will also offer selectable colors on the fields, more transparency and prettier connector drawing. Possibly also table type for mysql as well as a new export system for creating databases via scripts on remote servers. More later.