Brad Douglas wrote:
On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 14:27 -0400, William McKeehan wrote:
Well, the last time we discussed this, I think this is where the discussion
ended (after we managed to get a piglatin translation added to the
repository).
I've been playing and thinking about this a fair amount. What about using
HTML/JavaScript/XML ala Ajax? This would require Xastir having an "http" style
server that would serve up pages and would respond to certain queries with XML
code. For example if Xastir's server were listening on port 8001,
http://localhost:8001/getStationInformation?callsignssid=KI4HDU-2 would
respond with something like
<station>
<CallsignSSID>KI4HDU-2</CallsignSSID>
<PacketsReceived>75</PacketsReceived>
<LastHeard>10/04/2007 14:05:08</LastHeard>
<Comments>
<Comment>10/04 14:05 : .open2300v1.10</Comment>
<Comment>10/04 14:00 :</Comment>
</Comments>
.
.
.
</station>
Are you suggesting that everyone have a working http server on their
local machine? That is quite an excessive (and generally insecure)
method of accomplishing the given goal, locally.
I don't seem to have too much in the way of security problems with web
servers on darned near everything we stand up, either apache or tomcat.
We also run some stand-alone systems. I do tend to look for
excessive, unsuccessful login attempts and automatically block them, and
my iptables rules are pretty tight, but standing up a basic web server
and securing it isn't a big deal. Or, am I demonstrating, again, how
warped I've become?
Other things like
http://localhost:8001/findStation?callsignssid=KI4HDU-2&exact=1 would cause
the UI to behave as if someone had used the "Station-> Find Station" dialog
box.
To facilitate this, we could provide an Xastir "Object" in JavaScript that
would handle most of the heavy lifting here's a rough (very) start...
function XastirObject() {
this.myConn=null;
this.getStationInformation=getStationInformation;
this.findStation=findStation;
this.myConn = new XHConn();
if (!this.myConn) alert("XMLHTTP not available.");
if (!this.myConn) return;
}
function findStation(CallsignSSID) {
this.getStation(CallsignSSID, xastirFindStation);
}
function xastirFindStation(oXML) {
var xml = oXML.responseXML;
alert( oXML.responseText );
var station = xml.getElementsByTagName( 'station' )[0].firstChild;
var newStation = new station();
newStation.CallsignSSID =
station.getElementsByTagName('name')[0].firstChild;
newStation.find();
}
function getStationInformation(CallsignSSID, fnToDo) {
this.myConn.connect("http://localhost:8001/getStationInformation";, "POST",
"CallsignSSID=" + CallsignSSID, fnToDo);
}
function station() {
this.CallsignSSID = "";
this.find=find;
this.send=send;
return this;
}
function find() {
Alert("Ask Xastir to 'find' " + this.CallsignSSID + ".");
}
Does this sound like something that would be useful? Personally, I think this
would let people develop their own APRS "interface" using Xastir to do the
heavy lifting - and I think that if done correctly, this would eventually let
you run Xastir in a daemon mode and only use this interface if you wanted to.
IMO, wxPython is the way to go for GUI development.
IMNSHO, either will do. I write more javascript these days than python,
as someone else has become the python guru around here.
I imagine that adding a simple http server to the code would be pretty
straight forward; the only question would be if that server would be able to
get the data to answer the queries with easily.
I suspect that, if you're talking SOAP services (and WSDL) you're gonna
end up with a tomcat server. Still easy to secure, not, in my
experience, quite as easy to configure as apache.
Thoughts?
I highly recommend you look into REST[1] before proceeding.
[1]
http://www.workflowresearch.com/Publications/PDF/MIZU.JENI.KESW-DSS(2004).pdf
I strongly prefer RESTful services, too.
gerry
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.862.3982 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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