good progress on client utilities, next steps

Well I'm a bit happier now about error and exception handling. Wrote a bunch of client-side utilities and found/fixed two CowDb bugs in the process--it is always helpful when you have queries (like listOpenDbs in this case) that allow you to see what's happening.

Still a few more client-side utilities to go yet. And I must say, it is nice having bat scripts now for startup, shutdown, listOpenDbs, closeDb, blockUpdates, unblockUpdates and createBranch. I'll include them in the next release as well.

So it looks like COODBMS will be completed this week. Then a small quandry--do I work on a wiki interface or proceed with namespaces? My concern here is that there are so many bad wikis out there, and I think I can create a very interesting one once I've got namespaces implemented. So I'm inclined to proceed with namespaces rather than do another boring wiki.

On the other hand, having a user interface to COODBMS would be very helpful. Without it I can only do some batch demos. Of course, focusing on those demos would be a very fine thing. With the client/server architecture it will be easy to put together some nice test cases for looking at speed and loading issues. And once the client/server architecture is fully in place, there are all those CowDb tests and COODBMS samples to convert. What we don't have right now are some good tests dealing with masses of data.

Hmm. Looks like I should be spending April on testing COODBMS. That's the problem with creating real product--it takes so long to get to the fun stuff. Like inferencing!