Postage: A modern replacement for pgAdmin

NOTE THE CHANGED LOCATION! Revionics has been a gracious host, but a downtown location will probably be more convenient for most folks.

This month we'll be presenting Postage, a NEW web based alternative to PGAdmin3 and psql.

Postage has been built in the style of a standard posix utility. A simple configure-make-install is all that is needed to install on most Linux, Mac and *BSD variants. When you run Postage it will start a web server that you can connect to with any modern browser. Next, point Postage at any local or remote PostgreSQL database, with or without SSL, and it'll allow you to log in. Postage plans to be a feature-complete replacement for psql and PGAdmin3.

If you're used to the speed of PGAdmin3 you'll be very impressed with Postage. At the heart of Postage is a modern, fast, event-based C-binary, built in the style of NGINX and Node.js. As such, Postage is as fast as any PostgreSQL interface can hope to be (which just happens to be a lot faster than PGAdmin3) because it uses the PostgreSQL native libpq bindings, just like psql.

Are you interested in REST? Postage went a slightly different route but we do believe in limiting database access to an API. To transfer data to and from the server, Postage has, over the last eight years of in house development, experimented with various different transfer formats and mechanisms. For this version, Postage uses Web Sockets and an escaped, TAB delimited transfer format. PostgreSQL users will recognize the format as the standard input/output of the COPY statement. It's been simpler and faster than all previous versions of Postage and we like it. Come down and discuss our choices with us and share your insights.

For the HTML5 and Javascript crowd please note that Postage may be the most ambitious pure "Web Components" application to date. We've developed several firsts using Web Components technology, firsts that ease the development of web applications in general, and we think you won't want to miss hearing about them. For example, Postage utilizes custom HTML attributes in THREE NEW WAYS: to propagate application state, to fetch data from the database and to dynamically generate media queries! Mind-expanding stuff.

Postage started out as the in-house PostgreSQL Admin utility for Workflow Products, a software company that started out writing custom MRP and ERP systems for the aerospace and medical industries. We hope you're as excited about Postage becoming open source after all this time as we are! We want Postage to be THE tool for administrating and developing your PostgreSQL databases, but in order for us to succeed in our mission we need your feedback and suggestions!

• Have you always wished PGAdmin3 to have a certain feature or work a certain way?

• What would make an admin app for PostgreSQL a must have?

• Is there some feature that psql has that Postage needs?

We need to hear what you have to say! Come tell us!

All of the developers of Postage will be on hand and available to take questions and discuss features, architecture and roadmap. This is your chance to shape the future of the PostgreSQL ecosystem! Join us!

Pizza and drinks sponsored by Blue Treble (http://www.BlueTreble.com/)