WOW!
Holy Mary Mother of God!
Yes, this thing is fantastic. I had a list of the things I wanted and a list of things I really really needed in order to use this for projects I am working on... Everything that I felt I HAD to have is there...permissions, reformatting of the screen, tabs..And lots of things that I wanted and things that I had not even thought of yet.
I have to say this is singularly the product I've been looking for years to find. It is robust, pretty complete for a system that is not even at version one yet..and it looks professional.
Did I mention SPEED? Now yes I know MySQL is fast... I've done conversions of tens of thousands of records from one table to another in MySQL (through phpMyAdmin) that have taken less than five seconds to accomplish. However most web interfaces to MySQL are Slooooooooooooooooooooooow (say that with a deeeeeeeeeeep long voice to make my point...do it..now..I demand
Ok enough jokin around...Dataface on the other hand is FAST. When I started this project I had not programmed in years. So after my boss had decided to let me attempt it, just to be safe, he had me sit down with his computer network consultant to see what my skills were. SO weekly we meet and I show him the progress. Currently this is a system I am testing on my hosting provider space...across the net. Eventually it will be an in house run system. (After I learn all I have to with LAMP..) But even across the net most queries even FINDS take less than two seconds. If I set the display to say around 1000 records then I start to see a HUGE drop though in access time. From less than two seconds to..OMG: Execution Time: 2.9459290504456... This is exactly the parameters they had listed originally when they created the spec for this program. So of course the network guy is like..."that's over the net!" And we expect that it will be at least a little faster when run from our own servers.
Everyone that sees what we have so far (and we are just in the beginning stages) is always impressed. As we go along and I learn to tweak things, through CSS, the Smarty Templates, Dataface Triggers, and the Dataface API, well this is only going to get better and better.
Now something else...Documentation...MOST computer documentation is appalling. I am not entirely a stupid fella (not entirely) and I've read things that had me banging my head against a wall. (Try to start with CakePHP for instance). But the Dataface Docs...DANG! Right from the rip you can understand what Mr. Steve is talking about....He is concise, clear, ACCURATE...Without a lot of mumbo jumbo or the futile attempts at comedy that most computer programmers try.
So I can say without question that Dataface is, IMNSHO, probably the best web based product out there for MySQL.
So props Mr. Steve and thanks for all your hard work. I'm not exactly there yet, as far as PHP goes, but as I grow in knowledge if I can do anything to assist, holler at me.