Changes
I have some good news, and I have some bad news. Since the world is so accustomed to bad news as of late with the economy and what not, I’ll start with that.
I will no longer be developing my first add-on, the Rooster Teeth Site Extender. I’ve established that I simply do not have time to maintain it, or do the reviews. It’s disappointing to both me, and its users to have an owner who isn’t really owning it.
Now for the good news. I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance – er, wait. That’s not it. There is a new maintainer! In fact, I’ve already transferred the ownership of the project over to him. He cares a lot more about the project than I do, so it’s a good fit.
You can still report bugs in the same place as before, but I’m just a consultant of the project now. I wish the project luck, and it’s been fun while it lasted!
Asynchronous Storage API
That asynchronous storage API I’ve been working on for a while has finally been pushed to mozilla-central. That means you can now run database queries off the main thread without blocking the UI. This includes both read and write statements.
This may not seem like a big deal, but there is a big benefit to using this API over the existing synchronous API. SQLite performs a file system operation called fsync which pushes the data in the file system’s cache to the disk. This operation is inherently synchronous, and on some file systems (like ext3), can take substantial amount of time given the right circumstances. If this is ran on the main thread, the UI is locked up the whole time. By using this new asynchronous API, you won’t have to worry about that fsync holding up the main thread at all!
Perhaps the best part about this new API is that it doesn’t require many code changes. You still create SQL statements the same way, but instead of calling execute or executeStep on the prepared statement, you just have to call executeAsync. The method takes one parameter – a callback that notifies on completion, error, and results. The callback is optional on the off chance that consumers don’t care if something finishes successfully or not.
Iterating through results is not much different from before either. The only difference is that results may be chunked, so the callback may get notified about results several times (with only the new data). Some good example code can be found in the tests that landed with this new API.
I’d really like people to try it out and see if they have any issues with the API. There are already a few refinements with bugs filed, and a few more up in my head that we might want if the need arises.
Oops
When I upgraded Wordpress earlier this week, a also moved web hosts. I left all of my subdomains over on the old host because I didn’t have time to move them all over yet. Turns out that they aren’t working. I’ve fixed one of them, and plan to fix the rest tonight, but some of my add-ons sorta depend on stuff being around that clearly aren’t. Everything should be back up tomorrow. Please pardon my construction dust…
RTSE 1.0.10 Out
They were kind enough to land the spell checking of XUL textboxes on to the 1.8 branch, so I’ve properly enabled it now in RTSE. You should get a notification about an update within 24 hours, or you can just download and install it again here.
RTSE v1.0.9 is Out
I got some time today to get the file fixed up and the build out to all the places (I have to upload it here and to SourceForge). I also have to allow time to post all the release notices in the various places. It’s all very time consuming, and I don’t have a lot of time.
Anyway, those of you who have jumped the gun like me and have Firefox 2.0 installed (it’s just a release candidate, so don’t get it unless you want something that is potentially unstable), I’m sorry but spell checking won’t work. Well, it works in the sense that it underlines the word, but it won’t offer suggestions. This is because of Bug 346787, which might make it into 2.0.0.1.
Update in the normal ways (download it here, or have the extension/addons manager do it for you), and be on your way!