Porting Applications to Postgres

When I expressed my frustration at last night's meeting on the number of
business applications hard-wired for MySQL, David mentioned that the
postgres community offers porting help to developers of those applications.

With whom do I get in touch to discuss this issue?

My need (and that of others who have contacted me about the same issue) is
with XRMS <http://xrms.sourceforge.org/>. While I'm not a fan of web-based
applications, I'm apparently in the minority on this issue, so I just shrug
and use them because I have no options.

Xrms is the best I've seen in the sales administration/customer (client)
relationship management arena. It's written in php and uses the ADOdb dbms
abstraction toolkit. When I inquired about difficulties supporting postgres
on the ADOdb mail list, I learned that it's very easy to write a mysql-
specific application using adodb to communicate between the middleware and
the dbms backend. Apparently, use of postgres reserved words and mysql-
specific extensions or non-compliant syntax are the most likely stumbling
blocks.

Last January, I saw interest in porting the application to postgres in the
xrms web forum. I added my support to the request. Since then, I've done
some work in terms of table and attribute name capitalization for the xrms
developer who is looking at the postgres port. However, over the past month
or so he does not respond to my emails offering help if he provides me with
direction.

It would probably take too much time and effort to port xrms into a stand
alone application using python and the wxPython UI toolset. But, if those
who know much more about postgres and php than do I can get the xrms project
leader to agree to accept help, then those of us who have neither the need
nor the desire for multiple dbms' on our systems, each to support a
specific application, would be grateful.

Thanks for suggestions,

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM) | Accelerator
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863