Poster REST App for Firefox

Pretty useful plug in here to allow what otherwise requires modules, DLLs or IDEs. Don't know how I got by without it for so long.

Get Poster

On the PS side, why do low-level service applications typically lack quick client integration options? My web services visualization tool is the browser, not a command line or SDK. So let's put that app into the browser.

Poster does that. Thanks to creator Alex Milowski. Read his blog.

More Miva Merchant

There have been some interesting revelations here. What I've found can be summarized thus:

• Miva Merchant up to vers 4 uses a proprietary form of SQL called MIVA SQL. While it uses Structured Query Language, it does not share compatibility with MS SQL. Thus it is locked in its own fishbowl.
• Miva Merchant 5 and on to current 5.5 gives resellers the option of configuring their product to reposit with MySQL instead of MIVA SQL, which provides a substantial performance boost. My webhost of choice for this project opted for the MySQL configuration. This is good.
  
• Miva Merchant offers a range of export options for financials, including .dat files and the like. They do not currently offer any RESTful services of any kind. Thus the question of whether to REST or RPC for Miva is conclusively RPC or bust.
  

Contacting both HostMySite and Miva Tech Support in CA has confirmed the above. They recommend using Miva forums, but there is but scant info on this topic that I have found. The webhost tech department has been very cool and receptive to my questions and has custom configured my Miva-driven MySQL DB to allow me to connect and read data directly from it. This means there is finally a way to export data from the CMS portion of Miva and feed it to my custom Flex front end.

Now then.

The question remains, how will WebORB interpret the schema of this Miva-built DB? I hope well. Hand-coding RPC is out of the budget and timeline for this project. I am relying on the savvy of WebORB to translate the schema into useful server and client side code libraries such that, if all goes well, I can pull the inventory on the fly from Miva to my Flex application.

Between this and a lack of experience working with a MySQL .NET hybrid, I'm hoping it will go smoothly. I'm now creating the DSN to allow ODBC between the weborbconsole and MySQL, so I'll let you know what happens.