Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] WWWBoard2 - PLEASE RESPOND

[Olivier D. <dr...@sh...>]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 02:17:14PM -0500, Wizard wrote:
> > While we're at it throwing ideas, how would the speed of XML or
> > otherwise formatted single-file parsing compare to something like
> > DB_File? As far as I know, DB_File is part of Perl (at least on my
> > system) and it would save a lot of parsing work out.
> 
> It requires Berkeley DB which I'm not sure is available to all windows
> boxen. If you meant DBM files (which I believe is a different animal),
> that's part of Perl 5.0 and we could use that. I don't know about the speed
> thing, but I could test it.

I thought DB_File was BerkleyDB 1.x... It requires external libraries?
It's not the impression I got from the documentation :o|

> > We could also use CSV or some other database schema.
> 
> If we were going to go with some specific stand-alone Database mechanism, I
> think I'd chose to use DBD::XBase for the SQL support (allowing for
> conversion to Enterprise DBs), and include the CPAN modules. It works, is
> pure perl, and supports a reasonable subset of SQL92(?). I've used it with
> NeonDB. I am assuming however that all perl installs would include DBI by
> default.

The reason for my suggestion of DB_File is because the Perl code is
extremely trivial and compact. A single `tie' or `dbopen' and you have a
hash tied to the database data. From there it's all $hash{your_field}
which is a lot simpler than SQL queries...

I think requiring DBI might be a bit too much for "easy to use"
scripts... I mean there are plenty of online board software out there.
That use fancy DBMSs like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle. Security might be
a our main concern and is rarely addressed but I think we also need to
make it as easy as edit a config file and upload a few files (which I
think qualifies for all of our current scripts). This is key also to
keep the support request numbers down which seems to be a bit of an
issue at the moment.

On the other hand, using DBI opens the way to a wide variety of
databases which could ultimately be left to the user to choose in the
configuration file.

Oh Joy :o)

-Olivier


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