xmlrpc-c doesn't support any of these things, yet. But let's see if I can figure out how to do them with w3c-libwww...
xmlrpc-c doesn't support any of these things, yet. But let's see if I can figure out how to do them with w3c-libwww...
Here's a nice little Perl client from the HOWTO, written using Ken MacLeod's Frontier::RPC2 package:
use Frontier::Client;
$server_url = 'http://betty.userland.com/RPC2';
$server = Frontier::Client->new(url => $server_url);
$name = $server->call('examples.getStateName', 41);
print "$name\n";
Took a look at SOAP (a related protocol), and decided that the W3C overdesigns everything to the point of insanity. So for now, I'm going to take Larry Wall's(?) "bear of little brain" approach: If I can't figure it out in half an hour or so, it probably sucks.
School: Latin quiz tomorrow. Ick!
I also wrote some scripts that build a complete, tested distribution in one step--tarballs, LSMs, RPMs, etc. This required hacking around with RPM's _topdir macro.
What's next? I dunno, since user feedback has been so skimpy. Either an Apache module, or a "Building a Client/Server Protocol in 15 Minutes Using XML-RPC HOWTO".
Car: I figured out why my car heater was broken. Get this: dodgy fan, dead heater core, chronic low pressure in the coolant system, dodgy thermostat, and a crack in the radiator cap gasket. Fixed most of it with off-the-shelf parts, because I don't want to pay for a rent-a-car while mine sits on some mechanic's lot. Other care and feeding included new wipers, window moisture repellent and a car wash.
Personal: It's time to restructure my schedule. This means daily exercise, plenty of solid productivity time, and time off in the evenings. I've done this for long periods of time before, and it makes me happy. I'm sick of erratic shcedules and conflicting responsibilities, so it's time to shape things up.
To make a long story short, XML-RPC packages up a procedure call as XML, sends it to a server using HTTP, and parses the response. It's mostly useful for gluing together distributed web applications, but it's also handy for cross-network scripting. There are XML-RPC implementations for Python, Perl, PHP, Zope, REBOL, LISP, Dylan, Visual Basic, and a bunch of other languages.
Thesis: Now that Christmas is over, it's time to start work on my thesis again. I've successfully modified the d2c compiler to build dispatch tables; now I just need to compress them and write about the whole experience. :-)
[ Ranting about the Client From Hell snipped. ]
CustomDNS: OK, it's time to finally fix the authentication system. The problem: the CustomDNS authenticator wants to use its own database tables, not my customer's. The solution: fix CustomDNS to load the relevant SQL queries from the configuration file.
*hack hack hack* Score! It runs! One more billable feature. :-)
Language hacking: I cornered the new professor last night, and asked him to act as faculty advisor for my project. We had a great talk about multimethod dispatch, efficient bounds-checking, whether scripting languages can be compiled, and other groovy stuff like that.
I hope I didn't scare the poor professor away. :-( I can be a bit too talkative, as several people have pointed out.
There's another version of this conversation. It occurs on a daily basis past the 40 day mark, and it starts to involve other people.
CustomDNS: Lots of new features! The update server is now more modular, and you can add custom extensions. All the SysV init scripts and daemonizaton wrappers just got smarter, too.
Once I clean up the documentation and make some RPMs, I should probably release 0.5.
Language hacking: Hmpf. Designing a language is easy. Designing a good language is hard. You've got to look at each feature, and throw out the ones which don't do enough. But things are going well--the interpreter core is finally starting to shape up.
I hope to turn my language into a research project, and get some academic credit. :-) I'm going to track some professors down later this week. Here's my pitch: "I'm interestred in compilable, extensible scripting languages. There are these really neat papers by..."
Personal: Once my current consulting project is over, I'm going to buy myself some lego Mindstorms as a reward. ;-)
MFTL: I spent a few minutes last night setting up a private ZWiki to hold my lanuage design notes. If I can get a cheap co-lo this week, I'll make the wiki public.
Wikis (of any sort) make good design tools. But ZWiki also provides a great bonus: page hiearchies which still posses the Wiki nature. So I can sort all my language notes into categories and keep track of where I am.
My client is looking to hire a server-side Java guy. Through a freak co-incidence, one of the candidates is not only familiar with one of the libraries we're using, but was also the library's first major user. Score!
The candidate is also an open source developer, so I tracked down one of his projects and spent a few minutes reading through his code. Looks pretty good...
My Favorite Toy Language
I spent some time last night thinking about MFTL. The basic data model is starting to shape up, but I still don't know how I want to handle numeric types.
LISP implementations have traditionally used tag bits to label object types. All data values (integers, object references, etc.) are represented by a single word, and you have to look at specific bit patterns to infer the type. For example, you might use the two least-significant-bits as a tag:
xx00: 30-bit signed integer
xx11: 30-bit object reference (mask low-order bits to
zero and use as a pointer)
Addition and subtraction are easy (think about it). Multiplication and division require some extra shifting. Looking up objects is easy, too--just mask with 0xFFFFFFFC and indirect normally.
The big win: You can generate acceptably fast code, and your data model is easy to make thread safe. The big loss: Nobody wants to use 30-bit integers, not even in a scripting language. So I'll spend some more time thinking.
Personal
Everybody's leaving for school again! It's going to be lonely up here in the northern woods.
The 72-hour hacking run is now over (I'm wasn't a participant; just an observer). Bruce, andreas and igor wrote some utterly amazing code. The big suprise, though, was Gabor Greif, who magically produced an optimizing compiler for the input language. These guys are absolutely incredible.
Meta-Programming
(This is a big rant; you may want to skip it unless you're a language geek.)
General purpose programming languages are great. You aren't limited to any one problem domain, and you can build big, modular software without too much trouble.
Special purpose languages are also great, but at a price. Consider MatLab. You can write all sorts of signal processing code without breaking a sweat, but you'll quickly run out of gas if you stray outside the problem domain. (Same goes for Perl 4 and text processing.)
Common LISP tries to balance these two extremes. It's a general purpose programming language, but it also includes an extensive customization toolkit. You can define new control constructs for your problem domain, and bundle them into a library. In essence, you can embed your special-purpose language inside of an existing general-purpose language.
LISP has always been popular in the AI community, because every new theory requires a new programming language. But for a completely trivial example of meta-programming, you might want to look at this Dylan snippet for locking a POSIX mutex.
My Favorite Toy Language
I'm designing Yet Another Programming Language. This may take a few years to get right. :-) For the sake of discussion, I'll call it MFTL.
MFTL has three design goals, not all of which are entirely compatible:
Dylan succeeds on points (2) and (3), but does a somewhat poor job on point (1). I think it's possible to do a really excellent job in all three categories.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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