Some pretty big news regarding Lita

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Published by david_deraedt on March 5th, 2009 in Lita, AIR

Lita, my AIR based SQLite admin, is doing pretty well, thank you. It has reached more than 2600 unique installs so far. I'd like to take this self-satisfaction opportunity to tell you about the new directions Lita is taking, including the new team, a call for feature requests, and roadmap.

In the meantime, don't forget you can follow me on twitter to get all the latest news regarding AIR development in general, and my applications in particular.

We now have a team

First of all, I'm happy to announce that Adobe's own Paul Robertson has joined Lita's development team, which, so far, was just me.

Actually, some of Paul's code already was part of Lita : Paul wrote the EncryptionKeyGenerator class you can find in the AIR docs, and was later integrated in Lita's code base. And since he's also responsible for the rest of the AIR docs entries related to the SQLite API, I guess he's been with me all the time ;) .

Paul will now actively participate in the development, fixing bugs and helping me improve the whole software. Please keep in mind that this doesn't mean that Lita has become an Adobe project. This is absolutely not the case.

Call for feature requests

I would like to ask you, dear users, what new features you'd like to see in Lita 2.0. Code generation, visual database design, 3D flying pirates, you name it. I'm not saying we'll include all of it, but be assured that I will at least take the time to read it, and make fun of your unrealistic ideas.

I'm also looking for "power users" and other "extreme use cases" for the future betas. So if you'd like to be an beta tester for v2.0, please let me know.

Super vague roadmap

I'm planning on a v1.2 release in a week or so. This release will focus on bug fixes and UX improvements.

It will pretty soon be followed by a v1.3 release, due by early April. Again, this release will mainly focus on bug fixes, but may include one or two small new features.

There will probably be no v2.0 before this summer (read: after Flex 4). I hope it's out before September (read : before AIR 2.0).

I'd also like to repeat that Lita will remain 100% free of charge. However, be aware that I plan to use both Lita and ADM (my AIR application descriptor file manager) to promote my future commercial applications. Of course, I'll try to keep it as less intrusive as possible.

But more on that in a future post...

Erick (not verified) on March 05th 2009

great news and nice work ! I'm a big fan of your appz ( FCG made me cry of jealousy ;) ). I can't imagine how will be interesting to work with that kind of experimented guy Enjoy and good luck for the future

Hugo Matinho (not verified) on March 05th 2009

well could you put some db modeling there :) that woud make Lita sweet !

Trevor Hodge (not verified) on March 05th 2009

Since the inception of SQLite & AIR I have been toying with several ideas using these tools. I have been spending every weekend creating small Flex "proof-of-concept" apps using Cairngorm, SQLite, and AIR. I find myself repeatedly relying on Lita during my testing phases and I absolutely love the program. I would be very interested in beta testing Lita 2.0. On a side note, I had a suggestion regarding features for Lita 2.0. Would it be possible to integrate code generation for basic CRUD operations? What I had in mind was, create a wizard that will ask the developer some basic questions which it will use to create the database according to the answers provided, create the update and delete methods etc... I am thinking along the line of the database import tool that is included in Flex builder 3. I would be more than willing to help with this feature in any way. Respond to my email address. Thanks!

Max (not verified) on March 12th 2009

Edit data directly in the datagrid; add rows directly in the datagrid (like the mysql query browser). This way you can get rid of the two big input blocks at the bottom. View data in a BLOB field: use reflection to show class data if it's an AS3 object, display image if it's an image, ... I guess for this one it would be rather hard to detect what kind of data is represented by a bytearray in a BLOB field, but I doesn't seem impossible to me. thanks for the nice tool it already is; will be using it some more in the next few weeks