I'm really curious what effect will this have on databases. In theory, with the right authentication in place, everything could be exposed online and EDI would be vastly simplified, from sneakernet to HL7, everything would be replaced by REST calls.
At any rate, Freebase's attempt to organize everything is ambitious/stunning.
Wikipedia's own API, here.
Related: Talis.
Unbeknownst to myself, in a previous job I wrote an interface engine. It was a (initially) simple VB application which was reading files from a directory and copying them to another directory, then deleting them from the source. Then more source directories were added. Then, file endings had to determine the destination. Then, file contents (i.e., header or template-based triggers) had to determine which files were copied and which not. Finally, database tables became source/destinations. The thing had grown immensely since the beginning and it was running 24/7, with a 30 second polling interval, and a large number of customers were relying in fact on a rickety PC running a hopelessly spaghetti-coded application with manually-installed DLLs. If only they knew.
I did not know at the time that this was an interface engine. Somewhat restricted to healthcare and financial IT, one wonders why this concept hasn't taken off in mainstream computing more significantly. I.e., in databases, interfaces could provide a strong and pervasive (cross-platform, even) replication/synchronization mechanism.
Or perhaps the concept has been folded into workflow engines and transaction-based orchestration systems; Biztalk or Oracle Fusion can presumably do what interface engines do, and much more – but at a hefty footprint.
Mirthcorp's Java-based interface engine, below, running against a Cache database over JDBC/ODBC.
Message passing:
Channel definition:
A web-based interface engine? Perhaps using technology similar to YQL. Monitoring a queue of some kind and updating your Facebook status? Have to think about this one.
Cache's multiple interfaces (RDMBS, OO) can cause confusion even for simple operations, such as inserting dates. Here is how that is done:
In SQL:
insert into CM.StrmClass(PatientAddress, PatientName, PatientDateOfBirth)
values('5 Soi Rangnam Bangkok, Thailand', 'TG', {d '1990-03-17'})
Rather ugly ODBC formatting for the date field. In Object Script:
Set p.PatientDateOfBirth = $ZDateh("12/21/1977")
By the way, if a %Save fails (does not make the results commit to the database), then there is a problem with the data validation. Running the container from the Terminal should show the result (e.g. W p.%Save())
I'm not a new media expert but even I know that…
So maybe the death of print is largely exaggerated.
Excel (2007) is great as a quick database front end tool – reasonably versatile and easy to set up. This ease of use might make many want to be able to update a database from Excel, and that is not so easy.
It has to be done in code. One way would be through linking the Excel file to the database server (there are different mechanisms for doing this, e.g. OPENROWSET in SQL Server or the SQL Gateway in Cache). However, if you're running Office in 64-bit mode you soon discover that there is no 64-bit compliant Excel ODBC driver.
A quick and more natural solution is to embed the database update code in Excel itself; in the case of a Cache backend, there are two ways to write this code:
Dim cm As Command
Dim cn As Connection
Dim cns As String
cns = "DSN=CacheWeb User"
Set cn = New Connection
cn.Open cns
Set cm = New Command
cm.ActiveConnection = cn
cm.CommandType = adCmdText
cm.CommandText = "INSERT INTO Income(UserId, Income, Country) VALUES('@u', @i, '@c')"
cm.Execute
A bit more interesting since it gets into some Cache internals:
Dim Factory As CacheObject.Factory
Set Factory = New CacheObject.Factory
If Factory.Connect("cn_iptcp:127.0.0.1[1972]:TESTDBNS") = False Then
MsgBox "Failed to connect"
Exit Function
End If
Dim Income As Object
Set Income = Factory.New("Income")
Income.UserId = "2"
Income.Income = 120
Income.country = "PAK"
Income.sys_Save
Income.sys_Close
Set Income = Nothing
