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Monday, September 27, 2004

Fyracle on slashdot!!!

In developer area
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/26/1845230&tid=221&tid=198&tid=8

" Compiere is an open-source implementation of an ERP+CRM system, the catch is that it requires expensive Oracle databases (as much of the functionality has been encoded using Oracle SPs and such). There have been lots of talk about migrating it to other databases like PostgreSQL and donations were even seeked but not much have progressed... until now.

Firebird (not to be confused with the Firefox browser) is another open source database based on Borland/Inprise InterBase - much improved now of course. Last I checked half a year ago, it has full ACID, distributed transactions *with savepoints* (postgreSQL can't), external/internal stored procs, triggers, subselects, referential integrity, ANSI compliant SQL, SMP support, ODBC/JDBC, triggers, up to 64Tb Databases, embedded build, native WIN32 build ... and ... with an amazingly small footprint of 2.5MB installation.

Anyway, it seems to me that the crux of Fyracle is not that they rewritten Compiere to run on Firebird. It seems like they engineered a layer to implement all Oracle-like features on Firebird. Anything written natively for Oracle should be able to run off it! If they can pull it off, you can just rip out Oracle and place Firebird in.

However, direct compatibility may not mean the ported application will run with the same performance and integrity as on an Oracle DB. But it is a very good step forward.
"

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've spent a good time looking for fyracle's source. It doesn't seem to exist. Afaik, this is a closed source product. It also seems to be in violation of Firebird's license.

I've posted an inquiry on Janus' NNTP server, only to see it deleted promptly.

Where can one get the source for the patch to Fyracle ? ftp.fyracle.org is claimed in some posts to be the place. But it is impossible to log in that site.

Fyracle doesn't seem to be all that it promises to be. Something is fishy with Janus software.

I sure would like to know more about all this. I'd love to get my hands on the fyracle patch source code, but after hours of searching - can't find it. Do you know where it is ?

Popa Adrian Marius said...

Well if you know really well firebird/ib then converting an oracle project it is not so hard (You don't need fyracle)
It's an interesting project and this is why i posted it on /.
ps:
I think is open source , i got the sources downloaded from janus-software.com (patches for firebird 1.5.1) and took a look at source code (there are some functions that are interesting for me - but all can be replaced by udf functions)

Anonymous said...

Well, where on that website did you find the sources ? On the Fyracle demo page, we have binaries fb15.zip and fb15.tar, as well as compiere2.zip... Neither contains the source for Fyracle, AFAIK.

And I've found no other downloads on their site. I've browsed around ftp.janus-software.com, to no avail. I can't even log in to ftp.fyracle.org

So, where did you get the sources from ? Nobody seems to have them. I've looked around on the web a long time. If you've got the sources, are you willing to put them up somewhere public ? I'd be glad to host a mirror and a SVN for the sources, since janus software makes none public.

In some previous versions of the roadmap page on firebird.org, there were references to fyracle. But those have disappeared.

We hear much of fyracle but see little. Where's the source ? When I asked that very question to janus, on their NNTP server.. it disappeared promptly.

Something is fishy here. Where's the source ?

Popa Adrian Marius said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Popa Adrian Marius said...

Here is the download page for the patches
http://www.fyracle.org/downloads/

ps: fixed some spelling :)

Fikret Hasovic said...

Yes, download link is http://www.fyracle.org/downloads/

Anonymous said...

So, tell me if I got this right: Fyracle isn't really a modification of Firebird; rather, it's a closed-source Compiere Java wrapper for DB calls to Firebird.

What source do you see in that directory, really ? A 47kB diff to Firebird 1.5.1 ? Is that the whole of the Oracle compatibility mode ? No. It of course takes more than that - you can imagine some of the code is in those binary-only libraries or compiled java bytecode.

This only serves to reinforce my unfortunate constatation that Fyracle is not open source. Janus software waves the words of freedom around like they are cheap, but their code speaks otherwise.

They use layers of abstraction and obfuscation to hide the true nature of their realisations. Is it even legal ? The contortions required to understand the meshing of existing open source code with their proprietary extensions make it hard to tell.

I would like nothing more than to be proved wrong. I would love to have the complete source code required to build Compiere + Fyracle from scratch. I don't want to be dependent on binary modules of dubious purpose. Such a solution is proprietary - against the spirit of open source - and likely against its license.

Show me the source, Janus !

Anonymous said...

So, where is fyracle's source?