Hello Martin, Jim,

> >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.

I have the idea this is beyond the scope of Firebird. We don't
want to re-create Netrastructure/MS SQL+IIS/Oracle etc...

As an add-on product, I'd say: feel free to start it :-)

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL
Server.
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com