Schedule - PGConf.DE 2024
Box Framework - Out of the Box web applications on top of PostgreSQL Database
Date: 2024-04-12
Time: 15:55–16:45
Room: Ballsaal 2
Level: Beginner
Box is an open-source framework that aims to allow developers and DBA to quickly create and customize complex web applications on top of PostgreSQL databases, minimizing development and management costs. It is conceived to leave most of the logic and the user access rights on the database side, where it also stores the application configuration and the structure of the forms and pages in a dedicated schema. It can therefore take advantage of PostgreSQL advanced features like Row Level Security, updatable views, triggers, functions, etc. Box reads the DDL and builds up a complete web application with standard forms for each table. It easily allows the creation of custom forms and views, combining prebuilt widgets for each field type and more specialized ones like maps to handle GIS data, file managers with embedded image handling, nested tables, and more. This project is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the Swiss federal institute of forest, snow and landscape research WSL (www.wsl.ch) and wavein.ch. It has originally been developed to allow environmental researchers with database skills to manage their own research data, rapidly build web applications on top of it, e.g. to directly perform relevés in the field, export data or plot graphs. It is now becoming more and more feature rich and is moving outside the academic world, finding application in many other fields. During the talk, I will explain the framework's key features, the strengths, and why you may be interested in it. Finally, we will demo how fast it is to bootstrap a simple web application on a PostgreSQL database.
Slides
The following slides have been made available for this session: