Chapter 19. Other Useful Programming Tools

In the last few chapters, we've described some of the more popular programming interfaces and procedural languages that you can use with PostgreSQL. It seems that new PostgreSQL-friendly APIs, tools, and even procedural languages appear almost daily. You can find most of “extras” at the gborg.postgresql.org or pgfoundry.org web sites. In this chapter, we'll give you a short introduction to a few of our favorite development packages. You may not have heard of these packages before, or perhaps you have but haven't had a chance to learn about them. This chapter is by no means exhaustive—there are hundreds of projects hosted at the PostgreSQL incubators.

In this chapter, we'll introduce you to PL/Java, a server-side procedural language that lets you write portable functions and stored procedures in Java. We'll also give you a very short peek at pgcurl, a small collection of functions that you can use to upload and download web documents (using HTTP, FTP, secure HTTP, secure FTP, and so on) from within a PostgreSQL server. Finally, we'll show you a replacement for the psql client that combines the convenience of the bash shell with the power of a PostgreSQL server.