Hi John, > I have some concerns about the proposed approach... > > (A) What about results that are quite large? I.e. that take up a lot > of memory or won't fit into memory?
One major use case I see for this JDBC connector is to fetch a reasonable amount of data in order to assemble a representation for a client of a Restlet application. This representation might be in XML, HTML, PDF, RTF, ... or any other format that can be generated from an XML source. As for memory, we will rely on streams. When the representation is fully consumed, the stream or channel should be closed, which will transparently release the JDBC connection. The result XML format will use the WebRowSet implementation for now: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/sql/rowset/WebRowSet.html A useful piece, will be the addition of an XsltFilter later in 1.1: http://restlet.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=112 > (B) What about performance? Doing that extra transformation > is costly. There is always the option to use JDBC APIs directly. If you need to built business object from this JDBC data, obviously using a solution like EJB or JPA/Hibernate seems even better. > (C) What about those of use who really don't want to have to bother > with yet still more XML in the system? If people want to keep the current approach (XML request and JdbcResult response) we will preserve it and provide an option to switch between the two types of results (XML or JdbcResult wrapper). > > The main reason of this refactoring is that keeping an open > connection does > > not really comply with a REST approach. > > Yes and no. The purpose, IMHO, is for the service to bridge from a > purely REST to the messiness of things like databases. I think we all agree that this is a bridge more than a pure connector (JDBC doesn't define a standard protocol anyway). Hopefully the approach proposed above will coverage most use cases for this connector. Another road we could explore is the SQL/XML standardization efforts that allow an RDBMS to directly return results as an XML stream, without any intermediary transformation. See: http://restlet.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7 Also, I'd like to explore the usage of XQuery to access databases in the future: http://restlet.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8 Finally, we should also investigate the idea of a DatabaseHandler/Connector that will attempt to map as well as possible table rows and columns to a set of resources/representations, using a flexible URI namespace. It would support GET/PUT/DELETE/POST. See initial thoughts here: http://restlet.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6 Best regards, Jerome
