[Tutor] python and MS Access db's

[Erik Price]

On Wednesday, March 20, 2002, at 01:34  PM, dman wrote:

> I'm going to create my own server on the windows machine using
> MS' ODBC driver to connect to the db, and then use either XML-RPC or
> CORBA to connect to that server from the linux box.

I just started learning about XML-RPC myself.  I'm interested in it, and 
if you don't mind my asking, why you are planning to use XML-RPC over 
SOAP.

I have a MySQL database (fortunately I don't have to deal with the 
headache of proprietary drivers!) which is normally used to provide the 
content for a PHP web application that I wrote.  I learned [what little 
I know] about XML a little too late to make it a pure XML-based PHP app, 
but that's okay because it really only needs to be HTML.  But I've also 
wanted to make a custom web client for my users, that simply runs 
through a user-designated directory and extracts information about the 
files inside of it (some may recognize this, I asked about graphics 
capabilities of Python and intend to use PIL to do this).

The custom web client was originally going to be designed to open up a 
socket connection and communicate directly "in Python" with the Python 
CGI script that would be sitting on the server with the MySQL 
connection.  This is a pretty quick way to do it, but I'm starting to 
think that if I make the CGI script capable of working in XML-RPC (or 
SOAP), and have the web client talk to it in that language, then it'll 
be a little less work someday if I ever need to write a client in Java, 
or if someone else wants to access the database from ASP (a lot of 
people I work with use ASP).  So I'm just starting to learn about 
XML-RPC and SOAP, and wanted to hear your thoughts about it.  This 
doesn't sound like such a difficult little program, does it?


Erik