Firebird backward incompatibility

Hi,

To use the Firebird driver as the default sdbc driver for Base there
is still a missing feature considered as a blocker. The new built-in
FB3 dbms cannot open old FB2 databases.

Now (since the summer), inside the .odb file there is a FB archive
file stored instead of the .fdb file.

So the task is to replace the Firebird 2.5 database file inside the
.odb with an archive file. For that one need a FB 2.5 installation set
(the one we actually need from them is "gbak").

An idea is to create a simple web service for that. The user uploads
an odb file, the server replaces the fdb file with fbk, and sends the
file back.

The shell script would be something like:

unzip -d oldFirebird.odb temp;
gbak -b temp/database/firebird.fdb temp/database/firebird.fbk;
zip -FSr oldFirebird.odb temp;
rm -r temp;

It would be fun to do this, though I don't have much experience with
web services.

Cheers,
Tamás