[om-list] Re: development environment

[Mark Butler]

Hello everybody,

I am willing to install Postgres (I am joining a popular boycott of the
unwieldy name PostgreSQL) and Apache/Tomcat/Java on my Linux server,
gladius.middle.net, and let people use them for development.  

I will create accounts for well behaved developers on request.  In order to
get unencrypted network access, I need some sort of static IP address range
(as big as a small ISP's dialup pool) to allow access from.

You can also develop modules offsite with whatever development tools you have
handy.  The Sun Java developer's kit (JDK) is free and available on several
platforms, for example.

I have found several really nice advantages of Postgres - the most important
is that it supports inheritance. See:

http://postgresql.readysetnet.com/users-lounge/docs/7.0/user/inherit.htm

for a short example.  This should be extremely useful in our application,
although our tables will be much more abstract than the example used there.

Another very useful feature Postgres has is array support - It simply isn't
practical to store every component of a large vector or time series in
separate records.  See:

http://postgresql.readysetnet.com/users-lounge/docs/7.0/user/arrays.htm

Other useful things it supports are user defined types and functions written
in other programming languages - e.g. C/C++.

- Mark