But, there is no such XPCOM library that exposes a JDBC or ODBC connection. That's what's needed more than anything to create client apps. Because there is still a demand for client/server apps, and if you still have to go n-tier and hit a CGI/Servlet/Module/API on a webserver to access your data, XUL doesn't get you anything.
There are a lot of people doing things like shipping webservers with client apps that just launch the browser and point it to the local server, and would like to eliminate the added complexity. Installing/configuring a webserver, database connectivity and connections, and scripts to run their apps when all you need is to query a DB means that VB wins or you buckle down and build a full fledged Java App, or just go with an ActiveX control. IF XPCOM could give us Java's Security Sandbox with ActiveX's access to the OS, combined with easy XUL menus and access to HTML widgets (HTML tables are a must for good, easy layout) then you'd have a huge winner.
And XPCOM access to ODBC (or JDBC) would be the straw that leads to all the other things, like a good XUL IDE, other scripting languages, client caching frameworks, and
I've found Mozilla 1.4 and 1.7.3 to be quite a bit better than Firefox (and their inbetween releases) regarding memory leaks and rendering snafus, but still embarrasingly worse than IE at loading large or complex pages.
you do realize that you might come across more than one opinion on slashdot? There are several people posting here, and sometimes the group is not entirely consistent in their thinking.
We don't want XUL. We want to develop apps in HTML with a client-server paradigm. But we also want it to be a thick client. That's what all the ActiveX plugins are about. What we want is an easy to use XPCOM for file access, and the possibility of doing other things like JDBC/ODBC, raw sockets, local execution, and we want a security model like applets with certs and policys, but we want it easier to use.
No one has ever upgraded from MySQL to PostgreSQL. If someone was using MySQL and feels a business need to "upgrade" their database because of features, performance, or reliability, it goes to Oracle, DB2, or even Microsoft SQL Server. By the time you are pushing the limits of MySQL, PostgreSQL is not a feasible option, and certainly not a safe business decision. Likewise, I seriously doubt anyone has ever migrated from PostgreSQL to a commercial "enterprise" server. It is just not in the migration path. It is in it's own little advocate niche, and outside the mainstream of real applications and businesses.
I'm working on an application that uses (as one option) java applets for behind the scenes work such as file access, database connectivity, and encryption. The GUI is pure HTML. It's a pretty good fit.
The only problem is Java's totally screwed up security philosophy that "if it's a pain in the ass to use, developers won't use it, thus making java more secure." It looks like we may scrap it, since the problem the applets are meant to solve (avoiding complex end-user installation) actually can become more difficult trying to "hack" around java's "security" protection. It is perfectly easy to break out of the sandbox, but extremely difficult to do it consistently and safely.
All I know is that Mozilla works fine and Firefox is slow as hell and has a tendency to turn into unresponsive sludge on my PIII 500. It behaves suspiciously like it has some serious memory leaks and a near fatal flaw about emerging from swap. And Firefox is ugly compared to Mozilla. And a lot of plugins are iffy on Firefox (like flash and java) and when it comes down to it, Firefox just doesn't have the features needed to be a full use browser, and to top it off, it's default behavior sucks in a lot of ways.
You got to love Stephenson's renunciation of "In the beginning was the command line..." just because of a fashion and political affinity he might find with a certain company's marketing department.
Yeah me too, only it's the opposite. More like: "Say what you want about Eisenhower and the AEF but when they got rid of Mussolini, it was months before the trains ran on time again. FDR has no business attacking Italy after Hoover didn't finish them off when the sanctions for invading Abyssinia didn't deter the Fascists."
The point is that the literary writers dismissed Tolkien in exactly the same manner they dismissed most of the popular genre writers. However, as Stephenson points out later, his writing has found a measure of praise from the literary establishment.
Both Tolkein and Stephenson could be classified as juvenile writers, but for the first, it is because of his intended audience, for the latter, it is because of the writing.
I'd consider using PostgreSQL, but it seems the only people that use it are dorks that spend most of their time looking for MySQL postings on the internet and trolling about how Klingon-cool their database is. Show me a real user testimonial or even an article about using it that doesn't mention MySQL and I might give it a second look.
(No offense to star trek fans, but you've got to admit that there are some fans that make the rest of you look like dorks.)
Troll for Troll...
Why don't you just move your MySQL to an SMP box, or install more memory so your joins are cached? Oh yeah, FreeBSD can't. As for PostgreSQL, that's the kind of database a BSD zealot swears by, so I really doubt it's ability in a real environment. Not all of us are working on toy systems in our mom's basement and are just happy to have a terminal (Linux terminal, btw) on some long dying fork of system meant to run on early 1980s hardware.
Well, HSQLDB is embedded, but only inside a java application. It persists data in a flat file that it loads on start. If you've got more than 1000 records, you might want to go with something more robust, like MS Access. With everything in memory, it can do some things faster than MySQL. It's really only meant for simple testing, or small databases like a you'd have in a POS catalog. But it is a memory hog, requires a JVM running (which is also a memory and cpu hog.) A well tuned MySQL database, even reading and writing to files a lot will often outperform HSQLDB.
Berkeley DB isn't a "database" in the sense most people think. It's not relational, and there's no SQL (there may be a SQL driver, but it'd be totally inefficient. It's better to think of it as a big random access collection, since everything is a name-value pair. It's really designed for caching, which it excels at.
I've got customers very similar to your traveling salesman (my parents) and was wondering about a good way for them to install MySQL + Webserver + custom apps for them. Willing to share any ideas?
And yet we still have Standard Oil (Exxon), GE (NBC), and City Bank of New York/JP Morgan (almost every bank) at the top of the heap after over a century. Even Ma Bell (Verizon) is back. Walmart is the only innovator in the last 20 years among major corporations.
The Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany's last gasp almost ended the war in a stalemate, even though it was merely a bluff of little consequence. If the skies hadn't cleared up after Christmas...
In a down economy where the S&P500 has been flat the past year and is down 30% over 5 years, 3% a year looks pretty good. Better than 10 year T-bonds, actually.
Microsoft employees have been pissed off over worthless options for 5 years now.
Re:That is Disingenuous Spin, His answer IS politi
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 1
I don't think anyone who managed to get themselves properly registered to vote (that means passing a driver's license test in most states) had trouble noticing that he a) dodged the question and b) made a pretty controversial statement too.
But, by realizing that his answer was something similar to "if you're earning minimum wage, it's because you're too stupid to earn more." you realize that he *did* answer the question... well, tecnically not, he skipped over it, but gave his supporting reasons.
The part he didn't enunciate, was the "No, and here's why..." Instead he just skipped ahead to the "But here is my alternative solution." And, as politicians are wont, tried to gloss over the controversial part couched in terms that would not sound controversial to those who were ignorant or inattentive or malicious.
Everyone who follows politics even a little bit already knows his, and his party's position on the minimum wage.
Slashdot Mirror
But, there is no such XPCOM library that exposes a JDBC or ODBC connection. That's what's needed more than anything to create client apps. Because there is still a demand for client/server apps, and if you still have to go n-tier and hit a CGI/Servlet/Module/API on a webserver to access your data, XUL doesn't get you anything. There are a lot of people doing things like shipping webservers with client apps that just launch the browser and point it to the local server, and would like to eliminate the added complexity. Installing/configuring a webserver, database connectivity and connections, and scripts to run their apps when all you need is to query a DB means that VB wins or you buckle down and build a full fledged Java App, or just go with an ActiveX control. IF XPCOM could give us Java's Security Sandbox with ActiveX's access to the OS, combined with easy XUL menus and access to HTML widgets (HTML tables are a must for good, easy layout) then you'd have a huge winner. And XPCOM access to ODBC (or JDBC) would be the straw that leads to all the other things, like a good XUL IDE, other scripting languages, client caching frameworks, and
I've found Mozilla 1.4 and 1.7.3 to be quite a bit better than Firefox (and their inbetween releases) regarding memory leaks and rendering snafus, but still embarrasingly worse than IE at loading large or complex pages.
Try downloading IE. Last I checked, the barest possible IE install was 20MB, on win98SE2.
you do realize that you might come across more than one opinion on slashdot? There are several people posting here, and sometimes the group is not entirely consistent in their thinking.
You could have just said "None that I know of."
We don't want XUL. We want to develop apps in HTML with a client-server paradigm. But we also want it to be a thick client. That's what all the ActiveX plugins are about. What we want is an easy to use XPCOM for file access, and the possibility of doing other things like JDBC/ODBC, raw sockets, local execution, and we want a security model like applets with certs and policys, but we want it easier to use.
No one has ever upgraded from MySQL to PostgreSQL. If someone was using MySQL and feels a business need to "upgrade" their database because of features, performance, or reliability, it goes to Oracle, DB2, or even Microsoft SQL Server. By the time you are pushing the limits of MySQL, PostgreSQL is not a feasible option, and certainly not a safe business decision. Likewise, I seriously doubt anyone has ever migrated from PostgreSQL to a commercial "enterprise" server. It is just not in the migration path. It is in it's own little advocate niche, and outside the mainstream of real applications and businesses.
Do you propose suing the owner of a vehicle for leaving the keys in it if it gets stolen and used as a getaway car for a bank robbery?
I'm working on an application that uses (as one option) java applets for behind the scenes work such as file access, database connectivity, and encryption. The GUI is pure HTML. It's a pretty good fit. The only problem is Java's totally screwed up security philosophy that "if it's a pain in the ass to use, developers won't use it, thus making java more secure." It looks like we may scrap it, since the problem the applets are meant to solve (avoiding complex end-user installation) actually can become more difficult trying to "hack" around java's "security" protection. It is perfectly easy to break out of the sandbox, but extremely difficult to do it consistently and safely.
All I know is that Mozilla works fine and Firefox is slow as hell and has a tendency to turn into unresponsive sludge on my PIII 500. It behaves suspiciously like it has some serious memory leaks and a near fatal flaw about emerging from swap. And Firefox is ugly compared to Mozilla. And a lot of plugins are iffy on Firefox (like flash and java) and when it comes down to it, Firefox just doesn't have the features needed to be a full use browser, and to top it off, it's default behavior sucks in a lot of ways.
You got to love Stephenson's renunciation of "In the beginning was the command line..." just because of a fashion and political affinity he might find with a certain company's marketing department.
Yeah me too, only it's the opposite. More like: "Say what you want about Eisenhower and the AEF but when they got rid of Mussolini, it was months before the trains ran on time again. FDR has no business attacking Italy after Hoover didn't finish them off when the sanctions for invading Abyssinia didn't deter the Fascists."
The point is that the literary writers dismissed Tolkien in exactly the same manner they dismissed most of the popular genre writers. However, as Stephenson points out later, his writing has found a measure of praise from the literary establishment. Both Tolkein and Stephenson could be classified as juvenile writers, but for the first, it is because of his intended audience, for the latter, it is because of the writing.
I'd consider using PostgreSQL, but it seems the only people that use it are dorks that spend most of their time looking for MySQL postings on the internet and trolling about how Klingon-cool their database is. Show me a real user testimonial or even an article about using it that doesn't mention MySQL and I might give it a second look.
(No offense to star trek fans, but you've got to admit that there are some fans that make the rest of you look like dorks.)
The whole point of indexes is using multiple fields
Troll for Troll... Why don't you just move your MySQL to an SMP box, or install more memory so your joins are cached? Oh yeah, FreeBSD can't. As for PostgreSQL, that's the kind of database a BSD zealot swears by, so I really doubt it's ability in a real environment. Not all of us are working on toy systems in our mom's basement and are just happy to have a terminal (Linux terminal, btw) on some long dying fork of system meant to run on early 1980s hardware.
Well, HSQLDB is embedded, but only inside a java application. It persists data in a flat file that it loads on start. If you've got more than 1000 records, you might want to go with something more robust, like MS Access. With everything in memory, it can do some things faster than MySQL. It's really only meant for simple testing, or small databases like a you'd have in a POS catalog. But it is a memory hog, requires a JVM running (which is also a memory and cpu hog.) A well tuned MySQL database, even reading and writing to files a lot will often outperform HSQLDB.
Berkeley DB isn't a "database" in the sense most people think. It's not relational, and there's no SQL (there may be a SQL driver, but it'd be totally inefficient. It's better to think of it as a big random access collection, since everything is a name-value pair. It's really designed for caching, which it excels at.
I've got customers very similar to your traveling salesman (my parents) and was wondering about a good way for them to install MySQL + Webserver + custom apps for them. Willing to share any ideas?
And yet we still have Standard Oil (Exxon), GE (NBC), and City Bank of New York/JP Morgan (almost every bank) at the top of the heap after over a century. Even Ma Bell (Verizon) is back. Walmart is the only innovator in the last 20 years among major corporations.
Bill Gates still owns enough of Microsoft to control the board.
The Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany's last gasp almost ended the war in a stalemate, even though it was merely a bluff of little consequence. If the skies hadn't cleared up after Christmas...
In a down economy where the S&P500 has been flat the past year and is down 30% over 5 years, 3% a year looks pretty good. Better than 10 year T-bonds, actually.
Microsoft employees have been pissed off over worthless options for 5 years now.
I don't think anyone who managed to get themselves properly registered to vote (that means passing a driver's license test in most states) had trouble noticing that he a) dodged the question and b) made a pretty controversial statement too.
But, by realizing that his answer was something similar to "if you're earning minimum wage, it's because you're too stupid to earn more." you realize that he *did* answer the question... well, tecnically not, he skipped over it, but gave his supporting reasons.
The part he didn't enunciate, was the "No, and here's why..." Instead he just skipped ahead to the "But here is my alternative solution." And, as politicians are wont, tried to gloss over the controversial part couched in terms that would not sound controversial to those who were ignorant or inattentive or malicious.
Everyone who follows politics even a little bit already knows his, and his party's position on the minimum wage.
That's the reason Clayton Christensen is an associate professor and Bill Gates is the richest man in the world.