martin_agren wrote:

>Hi Martijn,
>
>Today, it seems, many devolopers are spending time building middle
>tiers that do nothing more than bridging exactly what a "published
>proc" would do.
>It would certainly be great to be able to call web services,
>protocol and driver independent, from all various front ends you
>work with. Web services, for those that havn't tried them, can
>return as complex datatypes as (even nested) datasets, making them
>great as database interfaces.
>
>As you say, IIS is certainly involved, handling the requests. And
>maybe this functionality is better implemented as an 'add on' to FB.
>But a generic solution would be much sweeter :)
>
>
>

This problem is the reason that Netfrastructure exists. At a
superficial level, the only extension to the standard JDBC interface is
a Connection.genHTML method that takes a property set (web server
connection attributes and query string) and returns text stream of
headers and a page. That's the easy part. The hard part sufficiently
rich semantics and security control within the database context to allow
a database application to run as database procedures. From a design
perspective, there are a large number problems that need to be addressed
before you could even evaluate a proposal. From experience, I'd
estimate that the scope of the work is about three times that of the
database engine itself.