pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

... not what you're thinking though.

Over the last couple of months I've been [re]writing scripts to
monitor and reboot the pile of shit that is my DSL modem (a Zoom X5).
It's ended up as a kind of interesting product
<http://galatea.org/status.html> downloadable as
<http://galatea.org/status.tar.gz> but I think it will only work on
Unix type OSs because it uses fork and other stuff I don't think
windows has.

Anyway the pertinent aspect in regards to this group is that I use
XML-RPC as the server/client exchange and it is an absolute DELIGHT as
well as super simple!  Also I'm pretty sure we can use this thing
called CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler to fake XML-RPC within the cgi
environment making it very easy to add these capabilities to our
ibiblio setup with zero admin changes.  This means that instead of
and/or in addition to plain XML as the medium of data exchange,
perhaps we should consider xml-rpc...  Not really sure how to explain
what it is and how it works if you don't already know, but it
basically takes care of converting the data to XML sending it TCP over
IP and then unconverting it back to data... even using a different
programming language as the client.  Truly kick butt.

This doesn't really give us any advantages in terms of our web based
client, but future custom clients could greatly benefit from this.

If anybody has good links to explain xml-rpc (or SOAP) please post
them.

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'