24. Gateway between PostgreSQL and the WWW - WDB-P95

24.1 About wdb-p95

WDB-P95 - A Web interface to PostgreSQL Databases was created by J. Douglas Dunlop It is at

• New WDB from J Rowe is at http://www.lava.net/beowulf/programming/wdb
• New versions of WWW-WDB is at http://www.eol.ists.ca/~dunlop/wdb-p95/
• For questions or to join Mailing lists contact dunlop@eol.ists.ca

You can try out CASI Tape and Image Query. You can have a peek at the Form Definition File (FDF) which is used to create the CASI Tape and Image Query too, which includes a JOIN of 2 tables.

This release contains all files necessary to install and run WDB-P95 as an interface to your PostgreSQL databases. To port this system to other database should be relatively easy - provided that it supports standard SQL and has a Perl interface.

24.2 Does the PostgreSQL server, pgperl, and httpd have to be on the same host?

No - the PostgreSQL server does not have to be on the same host. As WDB-P95 is called by the http daemon, they have to be on the same host. - And as WDB-P95 was written to use Pg.pm - pgperl has to be on the same host too. Pgperl was written using the libpq library, so it will be able to access any PostgreSQL server anywhere in the net, just like any other PostgreSQL client. As illustrated below

(WWW Client (Netscape)) => (HTTP Server (NCSA's http) + WDB-P95 + pgperl + libpq)=> (PostgreSQL server)

Curly brackets () represent machines.

Each machine can be of a different type : NT, SUN, HP, ... but you need the libpq interface library for the machine type where you plan to use WDB-P95, as you need it to compile pgperl. (The system was designed to use HTML tables so a recent WWW client is best)