Re: Postgresql <--> webservices?

Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> wrote:
> Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when philippe(dot)lang(at)attiksystem(dot)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