Thursday, June 16, 2011

Wizardry

When we first went online, many months ago, with the MVP (minimum viable product), the profile page had three or four options, and no subordinate pages. As we have added features, the members area of Rdbhost.com has grown to include six detail pages in addition to the profile page itself, the Rdbadmin utility and the log display.

For any given user, some of those options are irrelevant, and it can be confusing to have to sort through them. We have just added a wizard, which steps the user through the process of configuring everything necessary for their application.

When a user first logs in, they are shown the wizard and it guides him or her through initial configuration. All configuration options are available from the members pages, outside the wizard, or the user can rerun the wizard at any time. Whatever suits each of you.


The wizard can be as brief as four screens, or as elaborate as eleven. Configuring for use from Python can be straightforward, and use from JavaScript is necessarily more elaborate, as the browser security constraints have to be navigated around. Where we cannot do everything required (subdomain configuration, for example) for you, the wizard gives you guidance on how to do the necessary tasks.

Rdbhost, of course, is at: http://www.rdbhost.com
and the wizard is at: http://www.rdbhost.com/mbr/wizard

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Home, home on the Ra..

Our server move is done, and Rdbhost.com now runs on a later version of PostgreSQL, a later OS version, and is on a new server company. We were looking to upgrade the software versions, and Slicehost announced their planned termination, so off we went.

The new server hosting is with Rackspace. They seem to have a good reputation, so hopefully this will work out for us.

Rdbhost.com now runs on PostgreSQL 9.0.4. This is an upgrade from 8.3, and provides us some useful new features.

We have, in the past, setup roles as an automated website operation, but had to handoff permission setting to the user, requiring you to use SQL to set permissions for each table, index, or other resource, for each role. PostgreSQL 9.0 supports setting permissions globally (within the schema) for a given role, and permits setting default permissions for resources not yet created. For now, that is useful to you in manually setting privileges, but we will be providing an automated setup to set permissions broadly for each role.

Rdbadmin has been upgraded to accommodate system table changes in the PostgreSQL upgrade.

David

Comments are welcome.