New project

I attended one or two of the first meetings but I've
been writing a book so I haven't been to a meeting
in a few months. My book is finished so I'll be
attending again.

I've started a new project that involves the management
of network infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Web, etc.) that
has a database at its core rather than a filesystem as
most similar programs do. I've chosen Postgres for
numerous reasons but the inspiration for considering it
are the IPv4, IPv6, and MAC address data types.

I want to share my thinking about this project to see
if others have advice or alternative views.

1. I want to do as much as possible in long-standing,
industry standard languages, like SQL, that are likely
to be standards long into the future.

2. I want to do as much as possible in PL/pgSQL, putting
most of the automation in the database, where it's
closest to the data.

3. The application will have a Web interface for customers.
This will be done in JSP.

4. The database must "interface" with Linux daemons that
have no ability to talk to the database but look to the
filesystem for their configuration files. I'm going to
handle this initially with shell scripts that use psql.
Later, this functionality may be moved to servlets.

Ed Sawicki