Re: Using Postgresql as application server

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:54 PM, David Johnston <polobo(at)yahoo(dot)com> 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