FireDB - configurable web database

[drew]

It's been a while since we first posted about FireDB, so here is an update on where we are at:

FireDB is a configurable web database. It runs in the browser (of course). It sits on top of MySQL (although you can use MSSQL or other DB platforms too). The server side is written in PHP / Zend Framework, its basically a whole heap of REST web services. The ui is HTML / Javascript / ExtJS v3. We have a document template engine which is powered by Smarty, used to generate rtf / word docs, and datapages (html).

The core modules of FireDB are:
- Schema / Field ... creates database tables and fields
- Query Builder ... creates database queries, results in an Ext Data Grid
- Form Designer ... drag n drop gui used to create forms
- Form / Record engine ... edits database records the forms you designed
- Search engine ... powerful and configurable full-text search engine
- Document Merge ... create templated rtf / word docs, merges database records with document template logic (smarty)
- Code Hooks ... add your own custom logic with code hooks (javascript for client hooks, php for server hooks)

You can use FireDB to quickly knock out simple web applications like: CRM / Contact Manager, Ticketing solution, Calendaring, Quote tools etc etc. Anything that is list / record / form based will probably be a good fit.

Right now FireDB is a hosted service (we use The Rackspace Cloud), however we will be offering a download/self-host option in the future)

For those that are interested, you can get a demonstration account right now. Please Note - FireDB is still VERY VERY alpha, final version is due before the end of this year.

You can request a demo account from: http://www.firedb.com/register.php

Form Designer:
http://firedb.com/extpost_formdesigner.png

Form Run:
http://firedb.com/extpost_formrun.png

[kaigan]

Impressive, I played around a little, managed to close the form designer without it asking me for saving first, so I lost my form design :(

Must say it is really simple to work in however, really good job. Will play around some more later on!

[drew]

Hi kaigan

I'm glad you've had a look at FireDB. Form Designer does currently close the form without prompting if you hit the "cancel" or "x" button.

We're interested in how people like yourself use the system, and how you expect it to work too so we'll take in every bit of feedback and make improvements over time.

It's great to hear positive feedback to, I'm happy you're finding it really easy to work with.

After you've had a bit more of a play I'd be more then happy to walk you through some of the more advanced tips and tricks personally!

[brookd]

Looks awesome! How are you finding memory usage and consumption?

[qooleot]

Looks pretty interesting. A few bugs I found while playing around:

When I tried to add a sort of 2 to a column:

Errors:
- field_sortDir_1 - '' is an empty string
- field_sortDir_2 - '' is an empty string

You might want some easier messages to read.

Also, on the 'New' splitbutton at the top left, some of the submenus (like Address) are empty so that looks kind of funky.

When you right-click an item in the form editor, the title for the delete confirm window wraps and is cut off.

By the way, for the combobox to pick a field to search on in the upper right, what did you use for that to do the bolded sections that cannot be clicked?

[abillson]

@brookd

Memory usage is ok now, it got much better when we moved to Ext3. I've still got a bit of code cleanup to do which should improve memory usage.

[abillson]

@qooleot

Hey, thanks for the bug reports.

Validation Messages: Yep the validation messages are awful at the moment. The ones from our formengine are even worse. They are just the standard validation messages that the Zend_Validate (our server side validation) returns. We are yet to customize nice user friendly error messages and warnings.

New button: The New Button (we call it global new) should be disabling items that are empty (like address). Ill fix that one up.

As for the bold text in combos, we've done this to simulate an OPTGROUP. See http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=53521 for how its done.

[danh2000]

The screen shots look really nice - it certainly looks polished and very well presented!!!


FireDB is a highly configurable web database platform.

Maybe it's just me, but the statement on your website doesn't tell me enough.

What is the actual use case - why would I want to use this over MySQL on my own server.

[drew]

@danh2000

FireDB is a web application, we use MySQL to store data (but in theory could use any other major DB platform).

FireDB allows you to quickly create data driven web applications, all from within the browser. With FireDB you can create tables and fields, you can create forms to add/edit records, and much much more.

I suggest you check out our main demo video which should give you an overview … http://www.firedb.com/demo.php

And if you are interested, you can get a demo account and try it out for yourself.

[sam.ds.chen]

...

I suggest you check out our main demo video which should give you an overview … http://www.firedb.com/demo.php
...


But it seems that none of the demo videos is available.
The videos on Yutube are all deleted?

[mystix]

But it seems that none of the demo videos is available.
The videos on Yutube are all deleted?

they played back just fine from where i am (south east asia).
great firewall of china blocking youtube perhaps? :-?

[drew]

I've confirmed the video's are publicly available and still up on youtube.

Is it easy to get around those blocked video's or is that still causing a problem?

Youtube seemed like a great choice to host video's as they can scale very well and cope with high demand. It's also handy to have comments and stat's about number of views.

[devtig]

fireDB.com down? Didn't see much activity on the site before anyway. I liked their project though.

[suzee]

It looks interesting. Is the site down? Have you stopped development?

[dbassett74]

Pretty sure this is dead due to licensing issues.

[devtig]

they can buy a license...

[dbassett74]

they can buy a license...

Not for what they were trying to do. They would not have made any money since the restrictive licensing terms would have mandated that each of their end users purchase their own ExtJS license. Kinda sucks considering all the hard work they put into that amazing platform. But in the end, it was concerned competition to ExtJS since it targeted "developers", which the ExtJS license specifically prohibits.