Directions

I should probably lay out some directions for this endeavor. Nothing is set in stone, but I need to start somewhere. First, I plan to do all my work on the Mac. That's not to say this format won't be relevant for Windows, Linux, etc, it's just that I really don't care about those platforms. I will be using technologies and resources available on Mac OS X as my guide. If you have a problem with that, go away. Of course, I doubt there will be anything Mac-centric about this format, though the first things to use it will probably be written by me and therefore will only run on OS X. In fact, I will probably focus on OS X 10.4, Tiger.

Given that focus, I expect to use a handy SQL-based database. Since 10.4 comes with SQLite pre-installed, I will be concentrating on it. I assume any SQL-compliant database will work (e.g. MySQL), but my focus will be SQLite. I would also like to have the broadest choice of development environments available. I expect to be able to use Cocoa with Objective-C, Carbon with C++, AppleScript, REALbasic and as many others as possible. The idea is to increase access to the data so simply tools can be built around it. SQLite is accessible from all those environments, so it seems like a perfect fit.