UTF support sheduled to 2.0

[jda]

>I do not want to be ruddy, but I think RBDB will never serious competitor to
>Valentina.

I agree -- for high end and flexible work, Valentina is tops.

>
>
>---------
>And I just still not very understand...why for RB 4.5.3 you was able live
>with no Unicode, and now you simply die without this ???

Because since RB 5 came out (unusable for production at that time, 
BTW, but version 5.2 is pretty nice) I've been adding features that 
depend upon it (things like server capability made possible by the 
serversocket class). Since RB 5 uses Unicode internally, I have to 
deal with it. And in addition to this, there are lots of folks out 
there that want to be able to use Unicode (and word processors are 
being introduced for them -- such as Mellel and Nisus Writer Express).

So I've been coming out with minor updates based upon RB 4.5.3 until 
Valentina could deal with unicode. Based upon all the previous 
exchanges I'd been hoping it would be this summer, then when 1.9.8 
was released I started to think maybe this fall. Now we're looking at 
winter at the earliest, and more likely sometime in 2004.


>
>I can understand that you now need convert to/from unicode,
>Yes more works for you. But where is FATAL PROBLEM ???

The fatal problem is that I can't search for strings that contain 
unicode characters (yes, I can convert from UTF-8 to MacRoman and 
search, but then those that use non-Roman languages (Japanese, 
Hebrew, etc). won't be able to use it. Sorting is another issue 
(although not as important as searching).

Please realize that my app, like many others, is *international*. We 
have thousands of users, about half outside of the US. I can't know 
what language they will be using beforehand, and even if I did it 
wouldn't help, because many are multilingual and mix multiple 
textencodings, even in single records.

>
>For our Windows products VCOM and VJDK we self inside of this products also
>convert Unicode strings that come from windows to the single-byte language
>as Valentina expect. And nobody die...
>
>
>

If they died how could they let you know?  :->  (sorry).

So, unicode is something my users are asking for. I spent a lot of 
time perfecting my own shared library code to deal with Unicode (I've 
sent you some of it). With Valentina I've been  waiting until other 
issues were taken care of, and I thought we were finally ready to 
tackle this. Now it is to be delayed once again...

Jon