On Aug 5, 2004, at 11:30 AM, lex at cc.gatech.edu wrote:

> Kamil Kukura <kamk at volny.cz> wrote:
>> When trying to attract web developers from environments such as PHP, 
>> ASP
>> or JSP, I'm badly missing a thing to show as how Squeak deals with
>> external databases. Perhaps best way to connect to any DB is to use 
>> ODBC
>> which scares me as it relies on FFI
>> <http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2424>
>
> FFI seems the proper way to talk to ODBC, and ODBC seems like a direct
> way to get portable database access.
>
> Is fear the only reason not to use FFI, or is there a technical problem
> as well? Have you tried it?  Maybe we just need to smooth the process 
> of
> getting everything set up?

In this case there is actually a sound technical reason not to use FFI, 
which is that FFI can only support blocking calls, and you really don't 
want the VM blocking on something as I/O bound as a database query.  It 
means you effectively can't use ODBC in a web setting, or anywhere that 
you are going to have lots of concurrent queries.  It's useful for 
batch work (massaging/importing/exporting data) but that's about it.

The right thing to do would be to write a plugin that either used an 
async interface to ODBC (I can't imagine it doesn't provide one), or in 
the worst case spawns a separate thread for each query.