Redwood City Ð NeXT's database-access kit is being rewritten for a future release of NEXTSTEP, according to developers who attended a closed meeting of NeXT's DBKit Advisory Board on October 11 at NeXT headquarters here.
The new kit will be dramatically faster, more efficient, and easier to learn, sources said. It is also designed to store instances of objects and arbitrary data in conventional databases, in addition to integrating NEXTSTEP with existing legacy applications. NeXT engineers told attendees that a redesigned database-accessing methodology will make DBKit more reliable and ease the debugging of complex client-server programs that use it.
According to sources present at the meeting, developers complained that the existing DBKit version could be improved for developing programmatically controlled database systems. The DBKit objects were optimized for doing things like fetching complete data sets instead of doing selective queries or incremental database updates. The new release will address these issues, the sources said.
No date has been disclosed for the new release. NeXT declined to comment on the meeting.