Remodelers rarely build kitchen appliances from scratch. Store-bought models run better than anything you could ever cob up on your own.
The same thing applies to software apps. It’s hard enough to write code that does construction estimating and accounting. There’s no sense reinventing wheels, so we use libraries written by other people for most of the basics.
The good news is that there are plenty of software libraries out there. They’ll do just about anything. Most of them are free or cheap.
The bad news is that they are free or cheap. There is little incentive for their developers to polish things. It’s very rare to find a library that is fully reliable, well documented, and easy to use. Even if the source code is available, it’s often an ugly mess that someone whipped out on a caffeine high. Subtle bugs and security flaws probably lurk in there, but there’s no way to know for sure.
When you can’t view or fix the interior workings, it’s called a black box. Maybe it uses C++, or magnets, or squirrels. There’s no way to know for sure. Whatever it is in there, about the best you can do is learn the quirks of the black box, and work around its flaws.
The NeoAccess database was definitely a black box. A dank basement with spiderwebs. For Goldenseal Pro, we considered switching to MySQL or some other database library. However, we soon discovered that most open-source software libraries are also black boxes, and just as ugly inside. Better the toxic danger zone you know, than the one you don’t.
Anyhow, last week our staff finally decided to completely rewrite the cache-management code. The first attempt, adapted from NeoAccess, was just too confusing. Chasing down its bugs was like wack-a-mole.
Basic design was not hard. Getting it to work on new files wasn’t too bad either. Then we went back and tested the conversion from older Goldenseal files to the new format. For a while it felt like this bathroom repair. The conversion still uses NeoAccess to read the old file, and it was not happy with the changes.
It was time to put on the hazmat suits, climb in there, and update the NeoAccess cache system for a 64-bit world. We only need to run it one last time, but it’s an important one time. Our existing Goldenseal users will want to keep their old accounting data, just as much as we do.
Jiggling the cache system turned up several obscure bugs. It’s possible they weren’t hurting anything, but now that code actually does what it claims to do. After considerable effort, the conversion started working properly again. Previous testing was giving a few mystery database errors, but most of them disappeared. Sometimes it’s easier to just rebuild stuff, rather than fix it. That is one problem with black boxes: sometimes the weird stuff you do to work around their flaws becomes its own problem, even after you replace the black box with something better.
We’re still finishing the File Manager code that kicks in when there are more than 32,000 records, but this latest spate of database work is nearing completion. Then we can get back to interface.
Most ‘black box’ libraries were someone’s one-time project, then they moved on to something else. Our software is exactly the opposite. We have been working on the same code base since 1995, and probably will still be working on it in 2035. So, the goal is to make Goldenseal Pro the opposite of a black box!
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com