Oracle and Open Source

WWWdb

WWWdb gives you a way to search for text inside database tables. It provides facilities similar to those of Oracle’s interMedia product (formerly known as ConText). Klaus Reger has been working on WWWdb for about a year now, with the most recent release in April 2000. WWWdb is still in beta, but when it’s ready for prime time, it could be quite a tool.

The main web site for WWWdb is:

http://wwwdb.org

Installing WWWdb

WWWdb installation is currently a bit of a long and winding road, but we think performing this installation provides a good learning experience for those interested in Perl web technology.

Before you install WWWdb, make sure that the following are already installed on your system:

• Perl

• The Perl DBI and DBD::Oracle modules

• Additional Perl modules, described next

Installing special Perl modules

Like the Oracletool program described earlier in this chapter, WWWdb requires several non-standard Perl modules (such as LWP::UserAgent) to be in place, and you might not already have these modules on your system. You can get all of these modules from various places within CPAN.

Tip

These nonstandard modules are required only for testing purposes and are not essential to create your new httpd program, configured for mod_perl. The wise thing to do, however (as with most Perl installs), is to run the make test step properly, as we’ll describe in the following instructions.

You can get the first set of special Perl modules from the CPAN pages of Gisle Aas and Graham Barr at the ...