Progress of SQL database back-end

August 06, 2006

Tuomas Suutari is working on a Google Summer Of Code for adding an SQL backend to KPhotoAlbum, and I asked him to provide all of us with a progress report, so here it is.

I just merged changes from my developing branch to actual KPhotoAlbum source code tree (i.e. trunk). This means that now there is already some kind of alpha version of the SQL back-end in KPhotoAlbum.

Currently it's capable of storing almost all the information that the XML back-end does. Only member maps are not yet saved. But code for that is almost ready.

Next stage is to get error handling work, so when connection to database server fails, back-end does something more reasonable than just crashes. And also optimize few database calls to be more SQL friendly. (This is because currently many parts in the code assume that database is in fast memory, which leads to quite different approach than with SQL storage.) Then some kind of configuration dialog has to be done, so user can type username and password to server somewhere.

So there is still some work to do, but things seem promising. Though still some more testing of the back-end has to be done after the SoC project, but you'll get the SQL support eventually.