peterw;449366 Wrote: > 7.3 has been very good to me. 7.4, not so much, but then I usually avoid > running the betas anywhere other than my development system until public > release seems imminent. I, too, wish there was more guidance about where > things are headed. I think communicating plans and documenting APIs has > always been an area that could stand improvement, but look at the > competition -- closed development, and zero support for 3rd-party > enhancements. I'm confident we're still pretty lucky to have the Slim > Devices folks running this enterprise. > For me the lack of communication and lack of documentation is the biggest problem as a third party developer. However, as you say, if you compare with other companies performing closed source development, Logitech (formerly Slim Devices) is far far ahead of the competition IMHO. The idea of helping Microsoft or Apple with development on my spare time has never crossed my mind.
Changing API's isn't a major problem for developers that are active in the community, the problem is for all previously written plugins that stop working because they aren't maintained anymore and the original developer isn't around anymore. I'm still worried regarding the lack of communication, there were a lot more communication with third party developers a few years back compared to today. I haven't lost the hope yet, but I fear that the development community might disappear unless something changes. Back in 2006 you pretty much knew someone would answer if you posted in the Developers section of the forum, now I'm often pretty sure no one is going to answer if I post something else than simple questions there. However, I also understand the reasons. It takes time and effort to communicate with the third party developers and if you need to prioritize between fixing a bug to reach a release date or help a third party developer the prioritization is pretty easy. Most employees tends to prioritize the person paying your salary instead of someone that wants you to do something for free. I think the problem with the lack of communication is that most third party developers is involved because it's fun and they feel they are part of something. If there isn't any communication, it doesn't feel like you are part of something and the result is that it isn't as fun as it used to be. snarlydwarf;449447 Wrote: > > And, yes, there was a lot of "omg this broke everything" and Erland had > a mess in his plugins to deal with things the database layer didn't > provide an abstract method for him, etc etc. > Well, you can't blame Logitech for this. They provide the database abstraction layer because it contained all functionality they needed for the server implementation. You can't really expect them to make an abstraction layer to cover every possible usage. It also contains all functionality that I would need in my plugins if I had implemented them the correct way. However, I selected the quick and dirty path to get something out that worked and solved the problem, instead of making the proper solution to invent and implement my own query language for smart playlists. The reason I selected the quick path was that I do this on my spare time and it would take too much time to do the proper solution. Generally speaking, changes in the perl code has always caused a lot more problems in my plugins than changes in the database engine. This was the situation during the last SQLite->MySQL switch back in 2006 and the current MySQL->SQLite->MySQL switch. snarlydwarf;449447 Wrote: > > But, then, supposedly SQLite has made great improvements.. it's > certainly at least competitive for me (not seeing -huge- improvements, > but it's a bit faster than MySQL, other people may have different > results). > As a database engine it's a lot better than it was back in 2006 (when I think the MySQL switch was). I remember it had problem running more complex SQL statements back in 2006 but now the same statements works perfectly in the current SQLite version. The only thing I had to change to make the SQL statements in my plugins to work in SQLite in 7.4 was some MySQL specific functions and some joined UPDATE statements. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info) (Install my plugins through Extension Downloader) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library, Title Switcher and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.isaksson.info/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=66745 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
