Hi,

I have uploaded a document describing an implementation proposal for
the external procedures interface. The proposal is based on the JavaSP
implementation for Firebird that was presented some time ago in the
Firebird-Java group. The code seems to be quite stable, so we would
like to discuss whether it can be accepted as a generic interface to
support external procedures in different languages (Java, C#, Delphi,
PHP, Perl, JavaScript, etc.).

The interface was mainly developed by Eugeney Putilin, I participated
in the discussion, the document was checked by Vlad Horsun. The
document can now be found in the "Files" area of the group and is
called "external_procedures_impl_v1.pdf" and describes only interface
that code must implement to be able to process external procedure
calls. The proposal for external functions was intentionally left out
of the scope of the document. Also the document does not address the
issue of language plugin loading and accessing the engine from the
ESP. This is also left out intentionally to keep the discussion
focused on one issue at a time. Having said that we believe that now
it is the right time to involve the rest of the architecture group in
the discussion.

We are looking forward for your comments.

Roman