>Just a random thought that might or might not spark some better ideas...

As an extension of my earlier idea, how about having these plug-ins a part
of the server's configuration database rather than each application's GDB
files?

This would solve the redundancy problem if there were a lot of GDB's on an
individual machine and still enable a certain amount of cross platform ease
of use because this server configuration database could be replicated along
with transporting the GDB file to another server.

The application GDB's would then be configured to access the server's
configuration for the plug-in rather than an external OS dependant resource
like a .DLL or .so module directly. Thus, a GDB could be setup to access a
certain module in a platform independant way and the server would be setup
to alias and abstract the implementation of the module.

Then, it would be a matter of moving the GDB to another machine and
installing the plug-ins into the server's configuration and you would be
ready to roll... Being able to replicate the server's config items from one
server to another would be icing on the cake...

Let's name the server configuration file ISC7.GDB instead of ISC4.GDB...

I think the ISC7.GDB configuration database just needs to have more goodies
added to it including a system of managing plug-ins ( eg. security, UDF's,
external data access ), aliases (meaning GDB locations too), administrators
privilages (including credentials to prevent copying of this ISC4.GDB file
to another machine and hacking it), etc.

This particular file may ought to be stored in an encrypted format so that
it cannot be viewed in a hex editor and deciphered. Afterall, this would
most likely be a center of attention by a hacker looking for what inf. they
need to compromize a system.

All this talk about ASCII, Registry, XML, etc. for storing configuration
information seems pointless since we already have an excellent medium to
store information in. GDB! InterBase has already got that part right with
ISC4.GDB.

Am I going overboard here or is there some real feasibility to these
extensions?

My appologies to all that like a nice little bare bones DB engine because my
agenda is to get InterBase into the Enterprise realm of things...

Regards,
Jason Wharton
InterBase Developer Initiative
jwharton@...

InterBase will be the database of the new millennium.