What a sigh of relief - LQM 2.0 is out. Development of its most notable feature, Multiple Query Execution, began in November of 2007 and took three months to fully implement. Of course other things drew my attention like the December holidays, moving the GMITC website to Joomla 1.5, implementing a new subscription system, and the like. In fact most of the difficulty in implementing the new features of 2.0 didn't involve code at all, but testing the changes on a variety of systems, writing the documentation, and tending the news articles, the support forum, and the e-mail correspondence that is required when producing a product. This release is important - LQM now offers all the features that DBQ did, as well as many that DBQ didn't! So three months later the new product is out and now it is time to think about future features.

Moving forward, I would like to see a a few minor releases every two months or so, each minor release expanding on a feature introduced in 2.0. For example, one feature that I'm eager to implement is the iterative query which can be used to insert multiple records as long as there is user input. This is the type of thing that you find on forms that let you define multiple record sets - a Person for example, where each person is recorded as an individual record in the database.

Another feature that I need to look at seriously is the File Upload. Because LQM uses AJAX by default to load data, passing a file to the server is a more complicated task then the standard POST form. This has been a long desired feature and some research needs to be done to find the best means of implementing it.

The current TODO list looks something like this. For 2.1 we have a variety of form improvements such as 1) File Upload, and 2) Read-Only Input Fields. We also have some improvements to the results view such as 3) Use JSON with MQE, 4) Page Slider, and 5) Date Range Filter. The idea here is to add some basic features currently missing from the 2.0 release.

Things get more interesting with 2.2. On the table are 1) onChange Events in the Form, 2) Iterative Queries, and 3) additonal controls for the List view. My own workload, the needs of paying clients, and user requests for features may, of course, push these features up or down the priority list.

Finally, I'm still thinking about one of LQM's original concepts - the ability to work with any query. I would like LQM to work more with XML and XPath queries, and these features have been moved entirely out of 2.x into 3.0. No timeline on this one - it will be ready when it's ready.