Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Jeff Rogers schrieb: One starting point I'd be willing to help on here is an openid client (since I've already started work on it). Hi Jeff, A few weeks ago i have made as well a small openid client (using OpenACS, but not integrated with OpenACS authorities, cookies, etc). git clone git://alice.wu-wien.ac.at/openid Currently, this is just an openid 1.* implementation. Our goal is to provide support for openID 2.0 in the near future and integrate it with the OpenACS authorization system. Martin Matuska (working in my institute) is now looking into these matters. To use it, you need OpenACS 5.4 (maybe 5.3 is sufficient as well) and a recent version of xotcl-core and tdom. -gustaf neumann -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
I don't think TclSOAP uses tdom, does it? That might explain any speed problems. In addition there is Web Services for Tcl: http://members.cox.net/~gerald.lester/WebServicesForTcl.html I have not used it at all, so I can't offer any opinion...however it does look like it uses tdom. - Original Message From: Rusty Brooks [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: AOLSERVER@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Sent: Monday, May 5, 2008 8:04:10 PM Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites. I've used TclSoap. I wasn't like, impressed with it's speed but it seems OK. It seems quite behind the times, though, I did extensive modifications trying to get it to work with various WSDL files and in general it does not do a complete job, which is kind of frustrating, especially when integrating with web services that have TONS of data types and commands. It kind of looked like that WSDL implementation just didn't progress past a certain point. I might screw with it some time but at the moment I've got the manual soap definitions done for the apps I need to support, so, it's not that pressing. Bas Scheffers wrote: On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Bas. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Monday 05 May 2008 22:58, Brett Schwarz wrote: I don't think TclSOAP uses tdom, does it? That might explain any speed problems. In addition there is Web Services for Tcl: http://members.cox.net/~gerald.lester/WebServicesForTcl.html I have not used it at all, so I can't offer any opinion...however it does look like it uses tdom. Right Web Services for Tcl requires Tcl 8.5 and tclhttpd, it doesn't work with AOLserver. tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Bas, In addition there is Web Services for Tcl: http://members.cox.net/~gerald.lester/WebServicesForTcl.html I have not used it at all, so I can't offer any opinion...however it does look like it uses tdom. Right Web Services for Tcl requires Tcl 8.5 and tclhttpd, it doesn't work with AOLserver. Besides, Web Services for Tcl is based upon the TclOO package by Donal K. Fellows which is not (besides other issues) multi-threading/ AOLServer compatible (no serializer etc.) You might want to check out xotcl-soap (xosoap) as well which comes as OpenACS package: see http://alice.wu-wien.ac.at:8000/xorb-doc/ I don't think TclSOAP uses tdom, does it? That might explain any speed problems. Indeed, TclSOAP is built around TclDOM/TclXML and suggests one of the two C-based DOM backends: http://wiki.tcl.tk/9098 Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? I do not have a direct comparison, but probably some rough benchmark: http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xgws/soap_bench/linux_loopback/index.html (the accompanying paper is also a good introductory read) Generally speaking, and according to the benchmark above, Java-based environments (Axis 1.2 at that time) are (across all benchmark types) less performant than c/c++ based ones (gSOAP), by factors of ~7 (latency) and 10-15+ (end-to-end roundtrip, i.e. including de/marshalling, arrays of ints + strings). The picture certainly changed since 2004 because parsing (streaming parsers) and optimisation techniques (differential marshaling) gained momentum in Java-based toolkits, but it shows a tendency. Besides, memory footprint is not considered in the above benchmark which might be even more important than processing time depending on your requirements. We are currently working on a performance evaluation of xotcl-soap. First, tentative results show that xotcl-soap settles in the inbetween the two benchmark ends above, in the lower third of this range. But, again, the test setting is not directly comparable. I will report back if there is interest. Moreover, we work on optimisations (differential marshaling using adp templating, for instance) that might promise speed-ups by a factor of 10 in certain settings. //stefan -- Stefan Sobernig Institute for Information Systems and New Media Vienna University of Economics Augasse 2-6 A - 1090 Vienna `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 4878 [phone] `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 746 [fax] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
- Original Message From: Tom Jackson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: AOLSERVER@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Sent: Monday, May 5, 2008 11:46:47 PM Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites. On Monday 05 May 2008 22:58, Brett Schwarz wrote: I don't think TclSOAP uses tdom, does it? That might explain any speed problems. In addition there is Web Services for Tcl: http://members.cox.net/~gerald.lester/WebServicesForTcl.html I have not used it at all, so I can't offer any opinion...however it does look like it uses tdom. Right Web Services for Tcl requires Tcl 8.5 and tclhttpd, it doesn't work with AOLserver. Tcl 8.5 *or* the _dict (source, windows binary) extension for Tcl 8.4_ I can't imagine that it would take too much to make it work with aolserver...in fact I believe the main author of that package is using aolserver now, but I'm not sure if he has ported this over to aolserver. Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
In addition there is Web Services for Tcl: http://members.cox.net/~gerald.lester/WebServicesForTcl.html I have not used it at all, so I can't offer any opinion...however it does look like it uses tdom. Right Web Services for Tcl requires Tcl 8.5 and tclhttpd, it doesn't work with AOLserver. Besides, Web Services for Tcl is based upon the TclOO package by Donal K. Fellows which is not (besides other issues) multi-threading/ AOLServer compatible (no serializer etc.) huh? Where did you get that it is based on TclOO? TclOO isn't even out yet. And where did you get that TclOO is not compatible with aolserver...just curious (I haven't tried it myself within aolserver). It should be thread safe, as far as I'm aware (although I don't believe it is fully implemented yet, so you never know). Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Tuesday 06 May 2008 02:18, Stefan Sobernig wrote: Besides, Web Services for Tcl is based upon the TclOO package by Donal K. Fellows which is not (besides other issues) multi-threading/ AOLServer compatible (no serializer etc.) Web Services for Tcl isn't based on TclOO and it doesn't have any issues with multi-threading. The client works great. I have used it to test all of my WSDL example services. Here is an example of how to use it: http://junom.com/document/windows/TWiST/WS::Client.TXT I think I just used the ActiveTcl version of Tcl8.5. I'm not sure what it means to not have a serializer. Once WS::Client gets the WSDL file, you can create 'stubs' for each operation. Then you just feed it a list (without the element names, just data). A 'dictionary' is returned, which includes the element names (usually this could be fed directly to [array create] for simple structures). The problem with the WS::Server running with AOLserver is that it uses the tclhttpd API for I/O (biggest problem), but also uses many tclhttpd'isms to create web pages for documentation, etc. tWSDL with the TWiST API has a very thin connection to AOLserver. The same services, with the same TWiST configuration file can run under nstclsh, tclsh, tcpserver or even using a shell pipeline. The tclsh version can run using Tcl socket, or using Tcl Threads (recommended). The tcpserver version is great during application development because everything is sourced up from scratch for each request. As a WSDL server, the best feature of tWSDL is that you can define and derive types based upon the XML-Schema definitions, and you can validate documents against the type. Once defined, types are easy to create by feeding the type's 'new' API with a Tcl list (with no element info, just data). I haven't found any other WSDL toolkit which can derive simple types from XML-Schema types or easily create complexTypes where minOccurs 1. With tWSDL a single TWiST 'configuration' file completely defines the web service interface, there is no hand writing WSDL files or hand coding type validation, and your internal API remain independent of the external operation interface. tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Tuesday 06 May 2008 07:17, Tom Jackson wrote: I haven't found any other WSDL toolkit which can derive simple types from XML-Schema types or easily create complexTypes where minOccurs 1. Oops, I meant to say maxOccurs 1. XML-Schema structural type serialization is complicated. To do it correctly you have to know minOccurs, maxOccurs, if the element is nillable, the default value (for tcl, if the default is the empty string), and of course the data being serialized. tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
I don't need it as a server, I need it as a client. You mentioned something a bout being able to use the API to make a client? Rusty Tom Jackson wrote: Following up on my previous post about tWSDL... If you guys are actually using WSDL, please look at tWSDL. It functions very well as a server. But internally you can define/derive types as described in the XML-Schema types/structures standards. Once defined, you can create and validate types (including correct handling of min/maxOccurs, isnull, etc.) tom jackson On Monday 05 May 2008 20:04, Rusty Brooks wrote: I've used TclSoap. I wasn't like, impressed with it's speed but it seems OK. It seems quite behind the times, though, I did extensive modifications trying to get it to work with various WSDL files and in general it does not do a complete job, which is kind of frustrating, especially when integrating with web services that have TONS of data types and commands. It kind of looked like that WSDL implementation just didn't progress past a certain point. I might screw with it some time but at the moment I've got the manual soap definitions done for the apps I need to support, so, it's not that pressing. Bas Scheffers wrote: On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Bas. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Besides, Web Services for Tcl is based upon the TclOO package by Donal K. Fellows which is not (besides other issues) multi-threading/ AOLServer compatible (no serializer etc.) huh? Where did you get that it is based on TclOO? TclOO isn't even out yet. My fault. The only and first time I stumbled over Gerald's Web Services for Tcl was in Donal's tcl2007 presentation on TclOO*. Therefore, my misunderstanding ... And where did you get that TclOO is not compatible with aolserver...just curious (I haven't tried it myself within aolserver). It should be thread safe, as far as I'm aware (although I don't believe it is fully implemented yet, so you never know). I'm not sure what it means to not have a serializer. Let me rephrase, it is not said that it is not compatible (nothing to do with thread safety or anything in that direction), I am just saying that it might need some integration work. By serialiser, I am referring to the needed generation of the ns_ictl script in the aolserver driver thread. But, it goes without saying, this is just one option ... * http://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2007/proceedings/programmingtechniques/OOforTclFellows.pdf -- Stefan Sobernig Institute for Information Systems and New Media Vienna University of Economics Augasse 2-6 A - 1090 Vienna `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 4878 [phone] `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 746 [fax] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Rusty, Yes, there is a start of a client, which downloads, and parses a WSDL file. But there are so many poorly defined services, and so many options which you could use in a web service, that it hasn't been a priority to create a generic client. Instead I'm leaning toward redefining an external service using the TWiST API, and with tiny changes (like the URL of the original service), use a TWiST server as a proxy for the external service. In fact, this type of client already exists in TWiST which allows for testing the service via a web interface. ( See the example operations at http://junom.com/ws/mywebservice/ ) The testing interface is just a web page with a simple form. When the form is submitted, the values are translated into a client request, which is POSTed back to the same server (a seperate request). The only change needed for a proxy would be the external URL used for POSTing the request. Slowly this is coming together in the wsclient API (which will be similar to wsreturn ). tom jackson On Tuesday 06 May 2008 07:50, Rusty Brooks wrote: I don't need it as a server, I need it as a client. You mentioned something a bout being able to use the API to make a client? -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Tuesday 06 May 2008 08:22, Stefan Sobernig wrote: Let me rephrase, it is not said that it is not compatible (nothing to do with thread safety or anything in that direction), I am just saying that it might need some integration work. By serialiser, I am referring to the needed generation of the ns_ictl script in the aolserver driver thread. But, it goes without saying, this is just one option ... Well, it would require something more like a major rewrite. It was written for tclhttpd and the tclhttpd API are used for I/O. The service configuration files are written for tclhttpd as well, so those would have to be modified. But, it is a simple piece of software, only a few pages, just very brittle to external details. The client works great! I would recommend it as a first thing to try before investigating anything else. tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Tom, Let me rephrase, it is not said that it is not compatible (nothing to do with thread safety or anything in that direction), I am just saying that it might need some integration work. By serialiser, I am referring to the needed generation of the ns_ictl script in the aolserver driver thread. But, it goes without saying, this is just one option ... Well, it would require something more like a major rewrite. MY rephrasing on integration relates to TclOO and Brett's: And where did you get that TclOO is not compatible with aolserver...just curious (I haven't tried it myself within aolserver). ... NOT Web Services for Tcl ... just to avoid misunderstandings ... //stefan -- Stefan Sobernig Institute for Information Systems and New Media Vienna University of Economics Augasse 2-6 A - 1090 Vienna `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 4878 [phone] `- +43 - 1 - 31336 - 746 [fax] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Tuesday 06 May 2008 09:57, Stefan Sobernig wrote: Tom, Let me rephrase, it is not said that it is not compatible (nothing to do with thread safety or anything in that direction), I am just saying that it might need some integration work. By serialiser, I am referring to the needed generation of the ns_ictl script in the aolserver driver thread. But, it goes without saying, this is just one option ... Well, it would require something more like a major rewrite. MY rephrasing on integration relates to TclOO and Brett's: And where did you get that TclOO is not compatible with aolserver...just curious (I haven't tried it myself within aolserver). ... NOT Web Services for Tcl ... just to avoid misunderstandings ... Hmmm, why would using TclOO or any other Tcl code require doing anything with the driver thread, or require using ns_ictl? I still don't get what a serializer is. Is this one of those object system 'isms? tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Tom, I still don't get what a serializer is. Is this one of those object system 'isms? Well, no ... it is not an *ism in the sense of peculiar feature of an object-based/oriented system. Streaming an in-memory state into a set of characters based on run-time introspection is not a trait of OO. But for OO, take a look at: http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/1996/plop-1996-serializer.html Hmmm, why would using TclOO or any other Tcl code require doing anything with the driver thread, or require using ns_ictl? I assume that you are familiar AOLServer blueprinting mechanism? Tcl introspection (info) is used to stream the state of the interpreter in the driver/main thread of AOLServer to the connection/scheduler/... threads (and beyond, if you take Zoran's tclthread extension into account) early in their life-cycle. This happens in init.tcl-_ns_savenamespaces and helpers. So, in AOLServer Tcl's info + _ns_* family of procs + Tcl's eval represent a procedural serializer. But, as Tcl's info cannot introspect on the XOTcl/TclOO object system, these object systems need to provide their own facility to re-create the object graph (objects + relations) in terms of a script. Take a look at generic/aol-xotcl.tcl in the XOTcl source distribution, it amends standard _ns_savenamespace by a call to the xotcl Serializer object. So, unless you don't want to call package req on XOTcl/TclOO in each connection thread interpreter and want your AOLserver OO-Tcl Module available in AOLServer workers, you need to provide a serialiser. Or, you have the nifty feature of ttrace that comes with Naviserver. Either way is a design problem of its own and non-trivial (especially in the OO case). See the enlightening discussing over at naviserver-devel: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00136.html -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Dossy Shiobara wrote: Back in Feburary 2005, Dan Chak at MIT said something to me that I just haven't had the motivation to pursue. However, I really would like to hear what folks think of his statement: What AOLServer community needs is a bunch of fun, free applications for building personal sites. It's stupid, but that's how you get the initial hook on people. I'm not sure who is going to make and release these fun, free apps though, because there's currently also no audience for it. It's kind of a bootstrapping problem. It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem: most newbies won't try AOLserver for the heck of it but would go through the trouble if there was an application they wanted to run, i.e. OpenACS. Of course, there's little motivation to develop a fun, free app. for AOLserver if nobody's going to try it out. How do we break out of this deadlock? Fun Free apps. The hottest fun free apps currently are mashups and social networking things. And all the data providers (i.e., facebook, flickr, twitter, etc) have php and java client libraries (and occasionally a few others). I don't think any of them have aoslerver/tcl libraries. That is needed as an entrypoint. One starting point I'd be willing to help on here is an openid client (since I've already started work on it). The more traditional personal apps - news/content pages, blog/message board, etc - are still useful too. (and would be a reason for having an openid server also :) Prior to Dossy's call to action on this, I was thinking about starting just such a project for my own use (under the working name ASblog - A Simple blog, or AolServer blog, then expanding it to A Simple Site, but ASS site doesn't seem so catchy). OpenACS is out there; it's a great system but it's a big system, not really the ideal introduction. There's another problem too - free. Or at least, cheap. Not aolserver or the apps themselves, but a place to run them. There are lots of places where you can get php hosting for $5 a month (which includes a bunch of stuff preinstalled, email, etc...). If you want to host aolserver, the cheapest option I'm aware of is an unmanaged linux vps for around $15/mo and *then* you need to set up everything yourself. (and depending on the vps you might have memory issues) I guess this is just part of that chicken and egg problem. Maybe just call it /bin/sh (the shell of the egg... get it?) Somewhat related to this last point is my current interest (and frustration) in helping out small non-profits. I'd like to help out some local groups (preschools, clubs) set up websites for things like fund-raising, school supplies wishlists, news, and so forth; I'd like to use the best technology available as a foundation (imho, aolserver meets that criteria) but the hosting costs make it unattractive - the difference between $60 a year and $180 a year (labor costs are donated of course) is significant at this level. (I vaguely recall a story of Philip Greenspun pitching aolserver/acs to some nonprofit with zero software cost being a big selling point and being rebuffed because in their multi-million dollar budget was already allocated plenty for building completely new systems from scratch. This is a different league I'm talking about. The entire IT budget is maybe a few hundred dollars and most of that probably goes for printer ink.) Which brings me back to something I've mentioned before, shared hosting. AOLserver can do virtual hosts, but a little more framework would be needed to realistically serve multiple independent sites from a single installation. Nothing huge or insurmountable, just some isolation between separate servers so someone doesn't accidentally (or maliciously) overwrite someone else's data. Two quickies come to mind: 'ns_db gethandle' should not be able to get a handle from a different virtual server (I don't know if it can now), and there should be a way to run a safe interpreter and pass commands like 'open' to a setuid ns_proxy. The 3.x era nsvhr/nsunix modules let you run an entire server as a different user, but that would be even more memory-prohibitive. (Before someone says just use apache, it does all this well my point is that I don't want to use apache, I want to use aolserver because it's better for applications, and if it's worse for addressable practicalities when I'd like to address those practicalities and make it better.) -J -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Wait, I thought mashups were simply http requests from javascript to update parts of a web page. You return either javascript, html or an xml document, which is probably a worthless option. Maybe I got this wrong, but AOLserver should be able to step into a mashup instantly. tom jackson On Monday 05 May 2008 12:37, Jeff Rogers wrote: The hottest fun free apps currently are mashups and social networking things. And all the data providers (i.e., facebook, flickr, twitter, etc) have php and java client libraries (and occasionally a few others). I don't think any of them have aoslerver/tcl libraries. That is needed as an entrypoint. One starting point I'd be willing to help on here is an openid client (since I've already started work on it). The more traditional personal apps - news/content pages, blog/message board, etc - are still useful too. (and would be a reason for having an openid server also :) Prior to Dossy's call to action on this, I was thinking about starting just such a project for my own use (under the working name ASblog - A Simple blog, or AolServer blog, then expanding it to A Simple Site, but ASS site doesn't seem so catchy). OpenACS is out there; it's a great system but it's a big system, not really the ideal introduction. There's another problem too - free. Or at least, cheap. Not aolserver or the apps themselves, but a place to run them. There are lots of places where you can get php hosting for $5 a month (which includes a bunch of stuff preinstalled, email, etc...). If you want to host aolserver, the cheapest option I'm aware of is an unmanaged linux vps for around $15/mo and *then* you need to set up everything yourself. (and depending on the vps you might have memory issues) I guess this is just part of that chicken and egg problem. Maybe just call it /bin/sh (the shell of the egg... get it?) Somewhat related to this last point is my current interest (and frustration) in helping out small non-profits. I'd like to help out some local groups (preschools, clubs) set up websites for things like fund-raising, school supplies wishlists, news, and so forth; I'd like to use the best technology available as a foundation (imho, aolserver meets that criteria) but the hosting costs make it unattractive - the difference between $60 a year and $180 a year (labor costs are donated of course) is significant at this level. (I vaguely recall a story of Philip Greenspun pitching aolserver/acs to some nonprofit with zero software cost being a big selling point and being rebuffed because in their multi-million dollar budget was already allocated plenty for building completely new systems from scratch. This is a different league I'm talking about. The entire IT budget is maybe a few hundred dollars and most of that probably goes for printer ink.) Which brings me back to something I've mentioned before, shared hosting. AOLserver can do virtual hosts, but a little more framework would be needed to realistically serve multiple independent sites from a single installation. Nothing huge or insurmountable, just some isolation between separate servers so someone doesn't accidentally (or maliciously) overwrite someone else's data. Two quickies come to mind: 'ns_db gethandle' should not be able to get a handle from a different virtual server (I don't know if it can now), and there should be a way to run a safe interpreter and pass commands like 'open' to a setuid ns_proxy. The 3.x era nsvhr/nsunix modules let you run an entire server as a different user, but that would be even more memory-prohibitive. (Before someone says just use apache, it does all this well my point is that I don't want to use apache, I want to use aolserver because it's better for applications, and if it's worse for addressable practicalities when I'd like to address those practicalities and make it better.) -J -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Tom Jackson wrote: Wait, I thought mashups were simply http requests from javascript to update parts of a web page. You return either javascript, html or an xml document, which is probably a worthless option. Maybe I got this wrong, but AOLserver should be able to step into a mashup instantly. What you describe is ajax (asynchronous javascript with xml, although it seems no one uses xml anymore) plus dhtml (dynamic html) and yes, aolserver can certainly provide that without too much trouble. Many (probably most) mashups make use of ajax also, but the mashup part is that they take data from multiple sources - say, from google maps and craigslist - and put it together in some novel new way. A mashup can be done entirely or mostly on the client in javascript but a few things like same-source security, data storage, and having to work entirely in javascript within a browser make it convenient for the server to get involved. Which is why there are the php client libraries I mentioned for flickr, twitter, facebook, etc... The wikipedia entry on mashups gives a better description (and references!) than my blurb here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 -J -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Jeff Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Tom Jackson wrote: Wait, I thought mashups were simply http requests from javascript to update parts of a web page. You return either javascript, html or an xml document, which is probably a worthless option. Maybe I got this wrong, but AOLserver should be able to step into a mashup instantly. What you describe is ajax (asynchronous javascript with xml, although it seems no one uses xml anymore) plus dhtml (dynamic html) and yes, aolserver can certainly provide that without too much trouble. Many (probably most) mashups make use of ajax also, but the mashup part is that they take data from multiple sources - say, from google maps and craigslist - and put it together in some novel new way. A mashup can be done entirely or mostly on the client in javascript but a few things like same-source security, data storage, and having to work entirely in javascript within a browser make it convenient for the server to get involved. Which is why there are the php client libraries I mentioned for flickr, twitter, facebook, etc... The wikipedia entry on mashups gives a better description (and references!) than my blurb here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 We wrote a facebook API for OpenACS. It has some hooks into the OpenACS database api and OpenACS utilities but its pretty simple overall. http://cvs.openacs.org/cvs/openacs-4/packages/facebook-api/ Dave -J -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- Dave Bauer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.solutiongrove.com -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Monday 05 May 2008 14:29, Jeff Rogers wrote: The wikipedia entry on mashups gives a better description (and references!) than my blurb here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 Right, there is nothing special about mashups. An AOLserver application could instantly step in and provide services. It really has nothing to do with php, or Java, that is actually the point of this Web 2.0 stuff, and web services in general: language neutral. Of course, Tcl is a step ahead in this respect, since it doesn't care much about types. The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Bas. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
I've used TclSoap. I wasn't like, impressed with it's speed but it seems OK. It seems quite behind the times, though, I did extensive modifications trying to get it to work with various WSDL files and in general it does not do a complete job, which is kind of frustrating, especially when integrating with web services that have TONS of data types and commands. It kind of looked like that WSDL implementation just didn't progress past a certain point. I might screw with it some time but at the moment I've got the manual soap definitions done for the apps I need to support, so, it's not that pressing. Bas Scheffers wrote: On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Bas. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
On Monday 05 May 2008 19:45, Bas Scheffers wrote: On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Have you not used the twsdl/TWiST API? Sorry, only server at the moment, although you can build a client with the API. I have some benchmarks on AOLserver, for a simple service which uses all layers, but doesn't hit a database, 300-350 requests/sec. If you are doing document creation, you can do this pretty easily, you define your XML-Schema type, and then you can create the type by just supplying data. Example Services: http://junom.com/ws/ Config files which create the above services: http://junom.com/document/windows/TWiST/examples/ Current code: http://junom.com/gitweb/gitweb.perl?p=twsdl.git;a=summary tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
Following up on my previous post about tWSDL... If you guys are actually using WSDL, please look at tWSDL. It functions very well as a server. But internally you can define/derive types as described in the XML-Schema types/structures standards. Once defined, you can create and validate types (including correct handling of min/maxOccurs, isnull, etc.) tom jackson On Monday 05 May 2008 20:04, Rusty Brooks wrote: I've used TclSoap. I wasn't like, impressed with it's speed but it seems OK. It seems quite behind the times, though, I did extensive modifications trying to get it to work with various WSDL files and in general it does not do a complete job, which is kind of frustrating, especially when integrating with web services that have TONS of data types and commands. It kind of looked like that WSDL implementation just didn't progress past a certain point. I might screw with it some time but at the moment I've got the manual soap definitions done for the apps I need to support, so, it's not that pressing. Bas Scheffers wrote: On 06/05/2008, at 11:44 AM, Tom Jackson wrote: The main thing you need with a mashup is data. Without that, there is nothing to mash. And much of that data is in XML and tdom runs rings around any Java XML implementation, though not sure about the ones in PHP, Perl, etc which are also likely to be C based. (I am currently profiling and optimizing a car rentals aggregator site, which does tons of XML parsing and creating. Its all in Java and its not pretty; sooo slow and with enormous RAM requirements) Has anyone used TclSOAP? And compared it in performance to Java SOAP clients? Bas. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
As some of you may have already read, I will be having a student work for me this summer on fixing up the nsgd module---pushing out a lot of changes I've made that have never seen the light of day, adding some new features, etc. I mention this because I can think of several fun things to do with AOLserver and a powerful, flexible graphics generator. But I don't want to limit the fun to just me. If you have a good idea and would need a particular feature in nsgd to enable it, let me and/or my student (also named Matt) know. I read this list regularly, and my student _should_ be doing so Matt -- Matthew Burke Assistant Professor of Computer Science The George Washington University [EMAIL PROTECTED] 202.994.0718 -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
As a matter of fact I am working on something somewhat similar to that to some degree :) Basing on my AOLServer experiences while making one of the sites (www.tolk-i-polza.ru if you ask, but you got to learn Russian to use it) I am trying to make a framework that might help newbies. 1) It shall be much easier to install, use and extend than OACS. 2) Automatically (or semi-automatically, and only on some platforms) install aolserver and all needed components from source code. 3) Provide simple object-DB interface on top of ns_db , thus no SQL knowledge will be required to start off. 4) Implement templating mechanism (hopefully, easy to use and transparent) 5) Provide all code needed for ready-to-use rudimentary site, to be used as an example. I am doing this mostly for myself, so I could more easily seed new sites I am working on. Especially when doing something relatively simple. But if you think this might be worth sharing, I will be more than happy to do that. Thanks, ~ Alex. On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Dossy Shiobara [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Back in Feburary 2005, Dan Chak at MIT said something to me that I just haven't had the motivation to pursue. However, I really would like to hear what folks think of his statement: What AOLServer community needs is a bunch of fun, free applications for building personal sites. It's stupid, but that's how you get the initial hook on people. I'm not sure who is going to make and release these fun, free apps though, because there's currently also no audience for it. It's kind of a bootstrapping problem. It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem: most newbies won't try AOLserver for the heck of it but would go through the trouble if there was an application they wanted to run, i.e. OpenACS. Of course, there's little motivation to develop a fun, free app. for AOLserver if nobody's going to try it out. How do we break out of this deadlock? -- Dossy Shiobara | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://dossy.org/ Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/ He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on. (p. 70) -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
Re: [AOLSERVER] Fun, free applications for building personal sites.
That is not a bad idea, provided you have some documentation prepared for AOLServer. It will not do anyone any good to have a fun, free application if they cannot figure out how to install the software. The documentation does not have to be absolutely comprehensive. How about this: how to do a basic install on linux (a couple of flavors) and Windows - step-by-step instructions for the current version of AOLServer on current operating systems. a complete list of the variables in the nsd.tcl file and what they mean and some typical values a standard way to organize the files associated with AOLServer an intro to building stuff in AOLServer with tcl Before you jump start AOLServer with magic, make sure you have the basics covered, otherwise, it will just be magic. Thorpe Just enough for someone to get the thing working without having to feel like an idiot. On May 3, 2008, at 5:03 PM, Dossy Shiobara wrote: Back in Feburary 2005, Dan Chak at MIT said something to me that I just haven't had the motivation to pursue. However, I really would like to hear what folks think of his statement: What AOLServer community needs is a bunch of fun, free applications for building personal sites. It's stupid, but that's how you get the initial hook on people. I'm not sure who is going to make and release these fun, free apps though, because there's currently also no audience for it. It's kind of a bootstrapping problem. It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem: most newbies won't try AOLserver for the heck of it but would go through the trouble if there was an application they wanted to run, i.e. OpenACS. Of course, there's little motivation to develop a fun, free app. for AOLserver if nobody's going to try it out. How do we break out of this deadlock? -- Dossy Shiobara | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://dossy.org/ Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/ He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on. (p. 70) -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank. Thorpe Mayes voice: (405) 514-9753 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body of SIGNOFF AOLSERVER in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
