Well, I've been getting back to SQLObject development a little lately. I realized there isn't a whole lot that needs to be done before an 0.7 release, so I'm trying to get everything ready for that.

First, I put up a new site design. It's just like the new Paste design but with different colors. I also added a blog where I plan to make note of SQLObject-related stuff. Incidentally there's also a Paste blog. There's a CSS related problem that I don't understand with wrapping on those pages; if anyone has ideas... I'm also trying to collect links to SQLObject-related articles and projects; comment here if you see something that is missing.

The big change in 0.7 will be the introduction of the .sqlmeta attribute that holds most of the metadata. This gives a formal public interface for introspection that has been missing for some time. I'm also starting a more formal deprecation process; 0.7 shouldn't break 0.6 code, but you'll start getting warnings. With a public, stable API for introspection I hope to rebuild bits and pieces of SQLObject using that API (and a couple other metaclass-related protocols I'll add after 0.7). No radical rewrites, just creating new structures to replace the old, even though they will live happily alongside the old pieces.

Besides lots of bug fixes (which were all applied by Oleg, so I haven't kept track of them at all) the other major feature is probably the as-yet-undocumented sqlobject-admin command-line management tool. It still has some serious rough edges, but I think it's got a lot of potential. It helps you create your tables, which is fine, but the more interesting feature is how it can track the deployed versions your database schema and apply updates.

Automatically updating a database is a Very Hard Problem. I think sqlobject-admin tackles the problem in a good, tool-based manner, avoiding any cleverness. You run sqlobject-admin record and it will save the SQL of all your tables (if it's any different from the last recorded version). If you add --edit then it creates an upgrade file and opens it in an editor; you'll have to give the statements for upgrading the database on your own (that's the Very Hard Problem if you try to do it automatically), but it will show you a diff of what's changed in this version which usually makes it trivial to write the SQL.

Then sqlobject-admin upgrade applies any upgrading SQL scripts to the database, based on a special table in the database that gives its current version.

Anyway, that's what's coming in 0.7. I mostly have to fix up and extend the documentation a bit, update the News file, fix a couple problems with sqlobject-admin, and then release. No heroic effort required, just some grunt work. Further news will go on that blog.

By the way, if you want to read new stuff on SQLObject then Leonard Richardson has an article at DeveloperWorks and I came upon this document at Canonical.