HTTP Database Connector (HDBC): RESTful Access to Relational Databases

Relational databases hold a vast quantity of information and making them accessible to the web is an big challenge. There is a need to make these databases accessible with as little difficulty as possible, opening them up to the power and serendipity of the Web. Our work presents a series of patterns that bridge the relational database model with the architecture of the Web along with an implementation of some of them. The aim is for relational databases to be made accessible with no intermediate steps and no extra metadata required. This approach can vastly increase the data available on the web, therefore making the Web itself all the more powerful, while enabling its users to seamlessly perform tasks that previously required bridging multiple domains and paradigms or were not possible.