Re: Setup of annotea, perl+SQL, Pg vs. MySQL

At 16:15 15/07/02 -0400, Richard Michael wrote:

>Hello everyone,
>
>I'm quite interested in experimenting with annozilla and setting up a
>local w3c annotation server.  I have a few questions, if anyone has time
>to comment, it would be great.
>
>I'd like to use postgres instead of mysql (I have a bunch of data
>already in a pg db and correlation would be nice). I don't imagine
>changing the perllib modules would be that difficult, so I am inclined
>to do so.  Would this be a reasonable idea?

Yes (in principle at least).

>I think it would be preferrable to have a generic perl SQL module
>presented for user interaction and thus be independent of the back
>end (this of course limits the SQL to the intersection of the feature
>sets of the various backend servers).  Has this approach been tried and
>abandoned?  (I know this is more of a perl/SQL question than an
>annotation question, but I figured someone here might have have thought
>about it and I'm new to the perl/SQL combo.)

On the Perl level this should be straightforward. The Perl idiom (I 
believe) is to install a DBD driver for your particular type of database, 
then do

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect($data_source, blah...)

where the driver in question decides how the $data_source will be named. So 
in theory the change could be as small as plugging in a new value for the 
data source. (Disclaimer: I'm not looking at the Annotea code at the 
moment.) Of course there could be complexities in practice.

>There doesn't seem to be much traffic on the perllib mailing list, have
>the modules been superceded/replaced?  More specifically, is all the
>documentation at w3.org pertaining to annotea (and requirements) current?

I managed to install an annotea server on Windows NT using Apache and 
MySQL, using Perl from ActiveState and Perl modules from PPM, with only a 
bit of hacking (most of which were for Windows changes). So the 
instructions are probably fairly up to date.

Matthew

Received on Monday, 15 July 2002 18:32:48 UTC