Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I’ve finished the new Behold Download page, so now all the Behold site webpages are now at beholdgenealogy. The download page was trickiest because I had to change all the scripts to PHP and convert the Access database to mySQL. There’s still a few tweaks left (like getting it all to look the same in IE6), but it’s effectively done.

Now the website is made from HTML, CSS, PHP and mySQL. This means I am no longer limited to a Windows host, but can go to Unix if the need requires. However, staying on Windows for now is advantageous, since I have duplicated the site on my own machine (with an installed Webserver, PHP, mySQL and phpMyAdmin) and can develop and test without affecting the actual site. I also have my own machine as a complete backup of my online site, in case a disaster takes place at the host.

After 11 years online, this brief hiatus from Behold has allowed me to modernize to the new website technologies that have started taking off. This includes PHP, mySQL, WordPress and bbPress. Their community is exploding and I now am up to speed with them.

There is still one thing to finish off. Over the last three weeks, I’ve also been finishing up a project I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s a replacement for my Genealogy Software Links page and will become a Genealogy Software Review site, which will allow you to add your ratings and reviews of the genealogy programs you have used. I’m looking forward to making that basically a user-driven site, so that I can see what everyone likes and doesn’t like in their programs, and that knowledge will help the future direction of Behold.

Expect the new site up probably this weekend. I’ll announce it here on this blog, and also send out some press releases to some of the genealogy mavens.

Earlier this week, I finished and put up two of the last three webpages for this new site. Those were the Feedback and Buy Now pages. All that was left now was the Download page. That was going to be the trickiest because it involves a few web scripts and programs to allow calculating and emailing the trial key.

But what I discovered while I was trying to implement a check for valid email addresses was that IXWebhosting does not allow programs to be executed on their Windows servers. This means the PHP “exec” statement will not work, and compiled CGI programs (which I built using Delphi) in the cgi-bin directory will not be executed.

I was not pleased to find this out, especially when I was so near to having this all finished. So the key generation could no longer be done with my pre-compiled program that used the same code that Behold uses. I liked doing that because it guaranteed that the keys would always be generated the same way.

Other than finding a new host, which I’m not going to do right now, I’m going to have to rewrite all that code in PHP and very thoroughly check all of it to ensure it works exactly as it does in Behold. It’s unfortunate that I have to go through this work, but looking on the bright side, I can see some potential advantages of having it in PHP rather than in an executable, and I’m hoping I can have it finished within a week.

My mailing list, which was a ASP and Microsoft Access based tool on lkessler.com did manage to copy over and work right away on IXWebhosting. That is probably the only part of this web move that has. But it is the last remant of ASP and Access that I am using, and it may prove advantageous to convert that over to PHP and mySQL as well. Then everything will be integrated and accessible from the PHP scripts which may be better in the long term. Not only that, but I will no longer be tied to needing a Windows Hosting Service if I decide or need to change again.

So just a little more pain, for potential long-term gain.

The programming language I use for Behold is Delphi. I originally started over 10 years ago with Fortran, moved to Turbo Pascal, then Delphi 2 (1996), upgraded to Delphi 3 (1997) and finally stuck with Delphi 4 (1998) which I’m still using today.

So I haven’t upgraded to Delphi 5, or Delphi 6, or Delphi 7 (2002), or Delphi 8 (2003), or Delphi 2005 (9), or Delphi 2006 (10), or Delphi 2007 (11). The extra features of the newer versions never were enough to require me to switch away from the familiarity and stability of Delphi 4 which I was used to.

… until now.

The version I’ve been waiting for is just about here. The twelfth incarnation of Delphi, originally called Tiburon as its beta name, has been announced and will be available shortly as Delphi 2009. It’s got the one feature I wanted and need for Behold: Unicode integration.

Unicode is a double-length character set that has been standardized and is used internationally. It is capable of displaying character sets of practically every language on earth. The old ASCII charset has only 256 possible characters, and had to do a complicated page overlay to implement other character sets. Unicode fixes that.

All Windows operating systems since Windows 2000 have used Unicode as their native character set and the Internet uses it as well. But few programs, especially genealogy programs, have made the switch. Some I can think of off the top of my head are PAF, GenoPro, GenDesigner, Osk, Deudos, GENprofi, GEDitCOM, GenealogyJ and Genbox. I’m not sure if all they support it everywhere: in all their fields, their titles, inputs, reports, charts, the program interface, and their GEDCOM export and import.

I’ve only seen a few examples of Unicode GEDCOMs so far. Here’s a good small example.. Currently, Behold cannot read that.

But the goal is not to enable Behold to read the handful of Unicode GEDCOMs that are out there. The real goal is make Behold a Unicode program, so that when I add editing, it will all be in Unicode. You will be able to list information about your relatives in their native language and be able to store the original information as it was. For example, maybe you have a Romanian birth certificate with the name written in Romanian. It is very valuable to display the name in the native language along with an English transliteration and the English equivalent, because that is the name you’ll have to search to find other documents.

So my plan is to finish version 1.0 of Behold first. Then as part of the 1.1 version, I’ll switch to Delphi 2009 and include Unicode capabilities in Behold. But unless you have a Unicode GEDCOM, this will not have a major impact on Behold until version 2.0 when editing, and therefore Unicode editing, is implemented.

It really is impressive that Delphi 4 still works and works well. It says a lot for the quality of that product. And I’m looking forward to all the other enhancements that Delphi added over the years.