Version 3.2 is done

I will release the next version 3.2 tomorrow 28th May.
It contains the promised improvements to the infrastructure.

Towards stronger types internally

The next version of Pyrrho will use much stronger generics. The internal Tree structures will be Tree<Key,Value> instead of just Tree<Key> . But this is taking an age to sort out...
With any luck version 3.2 should be out next month (June 2009) though.
The change has flushed out a few obscure bugs, but unfortunately the changes to the code are extensive so no doubt there will be the occasional null refernce that slips through. So if you get a bad message from the server, please let me know about it...

The REST service

Pyrrho's new REST service is similar to ADO.NET data services, from which it differs by providing a default data model. For a Pyrrho database file myfile, the default data service is myfile.svc. Custom data models can be supplied, and then the data service is given the same name as the data model, e.g. mymodel.pdm.

The service is hosted by default on port 8080 on the host running the Pyrrho DBMS server, e.g.

http://example.com:8080/mydatabase.svc/

and the rest of the URI follows the rules for ADO.NET. As with ADO.NET, the detailed datamodel is obtained by adding $metadata to the end of the service URI.

The methods GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE are supported. If no resource path is specified, a GET on the service gives a synopsis of the service, and otherwise returns XML for the specified data. POST is used for inserting new entities, PUT for updating specified data in existing entities, and DELETE for deleting specified entities.

However, to make any changes to the database, you need to supply UserID and Role identifiers in the HTTP headers. This means that most browser access will support only GET,