-----Original Message----- From: pgsql-general-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Merlin Moncure Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 6:10 PM To: David Johnston Cc: Darren Duncan; pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Using Postgresql as application server On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:54 PM, David Johnston <polobo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>>I believe that it is ideal for Postgres to be computationally >>>complete in that one *could* use it to implement a complete >>>application. That isn't to say one should do this as a matter of >>>course, good to use appropriate tools for a >>job, but that it should >>>at least be possible if one wanted to. -- Darren Duncan > > So who wants to fund the effort to create the necessary infrastructure to display a programmer-defined user interface screen (think of the "Forms" module in Microsoft Access)? Or are you expecting the end-user to open up PgAdmin and type "SELECT hello_world();". I would argue that because PostgreSQL is able to talk with many languages that can create these "Forms" (or even - through extensions - a web-browser) that such functionality is NOT DESIREABLE and thus PostgreSQL would not ideally be "computationally complete" by that definition. I've been thinking for a while about doing this: describe the interface in tables along with some rendering code which directly accepts the request and spits out some html. I'd be gunning for something with the speed and ease of development of delphi, which fwict has never been reproduced. So you'd have a 'form' table which you could then bind to a real table via an adapter or some automatic scaffolding which renders the entry based on the structure of the table. Sitting in front of the database would probably be an ultra thin web server like node.js which just grabs the request and hands it to the database through a simple connection pool. merlin -------------------------------------------------- A more powerful (and complex) solution would be to integrate some form of "Templating" solution (e.g., Velocity) and require that the interface definitions be templates that generate valid HTML upon processing (since your solution already requires an external web browser anyway). Hstore and Cursors (with a named composite type) could be used to feed data into the template. David J. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
