Re: Prolog on a web server

From: Paul Singleton (paul.singleton_at_bcs.org.uk)
Date: 10/28/03 

Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:54:34 +0000

Your requirements are a special case: your web clients don't
log in or submit shopping baskets; you have a read-only web
app whose data is (still) small enough for you to be happy to
manually text-edit it (lucky you? :-)

Suppose you had 100MB or more data: your web host (who is
trying to run maybe 200 web apps per server) wouldn't be
thrilled if you wanted to load it all into server VM :-/
and if you left it on disk you really oughta index it,
which is what RDBMSs do...

I guess your web host uses GNU/Linux and MySQL? Ask them
if you can FTP a comma-separated data file and bulk-load it
(LOAD DATA INFILE) into a table (you'll need their cooperation
over permissions).

Alternatively, rapidly build yourself a desktop app (Delphi?
Access? VB?) to update your web host database over the net
(MySQL has free ODBC and JDBC drivers) or use the MySQLCC
gui client to edit your tables.

As for Prolog, it could surely be the basis of a decent
grown-up database query language (an open standard dialect
and protocol needs to be agreed) and server (SWI-Prolog is
probably best placed to become Prolog's own MySQL?) but for
now you'll typically have to rent a dedicated server if you
want to run a Prolog system (or use a Prolog which compiles
to Java)

FWIW I believe that Prolog's *only* hope is to leverage (sorry)
Java's wealth of mature networking (etc) stuff: it's
well-engineered and -documented, and has credibility with
corporate customers: I just want to implement the business
logic, database, forms etc. using (something close to) Prolog's
data and computational models. And this all has to be done
with open source and standards: I reckon idiosyncratic
proprietary systems work *against* the wider acceptance of
Prolog for serious commercial applications :-(

Paul Singleton

Nick Wedd wrote:

> ...
> If I want to change some data, I would like to be able to take the file
> containing it, edit it with a text editor, and upload it. If the data
> is in Prolog predicates, I can do this easily, without feeling guilty
> about it. If it is in the tables of a relational database, I can still
> do this, with some difficulty, but I am not "meant" to do data
> maintenance like that. I am "meant" to write some SQL (which I am not
> comfortable with), embed it in php (ditto), embed that in html (easy),
> upload it, and then type in the data to the form I have created. This
> is what feels to me like typing with gloves on.
> ...
>
> Nick

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