Postgresql <--> webservices?

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when philippe.lang@attiksystem.ch ("Philippe Lang") wrote:

Does anyone have experience in interfacing a Postgresql database
(tables? plpgsql functions? perl functions?) with the outside world
through webservices? (XML-RPC, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL...)

Yeah, I did some of this using the Perl SOAP module.

The robust way involves getting Apache involved so that you've got
something that starts the services 'on demand,' as well as a
connection pool manager. Perl's weaker on the WSDL side of things, as
that is something typically autogenerated by a language compiler,
whilst Perl is pretty dynamic and way too weakly typed; if you want
WSDL, Java is probably the way to go...

Contrary to how it gets billed, this is pretty heavyweight stuff,
because you have a pretty thick layer of XML encoding on top of the
data.
--
"cbbrowne","@","acm.org"
http://linuxfinances.info/info/soap.html
"What I find most amusing about com and .NET is that they are trying
to solve a problem I only had when programming using MS tools."
-- Max M <maxm@mxm.dk> (on comp.lang.python)

Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> wrote:

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when philippe.lang@attiksystem.ch ("Philippe Lang") wrote:

Does anyone have experience in interfacing a Postgresql database
(tables? plpgsql functions? perl functions?) with the outside world
through webservices? (XML-RPC, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL...)

Yeah, I did some of this using the Perl SOAP module.

The robust way involves getting Apache involved so that you've got
something that starts the services 'on demand,' as well as a
connection pool manager. Perl's weaker on the WSDL side of things, as
that is something typically autogenerated by a language compiler,
whilst Perl is pretty dynamic and way too weakly typed; if you want
WSDL, Java is probably the way to go...

Contrary to how it gets billed, this is pretty heavyweight stuff,
because you have a pretty thick layer of XML encoding on top of the
data.

I've done this twice with C and the gsoap library.

Works very well, but you have the deveopment time and effort involved with
C apps. gsoap generates a WSDL from your header files, which is nice.
And, of course, it's very fast.

You have to write your own connection handling routines, so there's a bit
of work to do there. Especially if you want to avoid the latency of
establishing the Postgres connection, and thus need preforked or
pretreaded systems.

--
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com

Philippe Lang wrote:

Hello,

Does anyone have experience in interfacing a Postgresql database
(tables? plpgsql functions? perl functions?) with the outside world
through webservices? (XML-RPC, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL...)

Philippe

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Yes, using Ada Web Server, and it's SOAP module + an Ada interface to libpq.
Works very well, but I did it only as a test, no 'real world' application
was developed.
/Bj�rn