Re: [Monotone-devel] A Two-Fold Proposal: On Formats And Front-Ends

[Conrad Steenberg]

Hi Larry

Just a note that we've been using JSON for a while to develop web
services and are really happy with it, compared to various XML
incantations. 

E.g. it makes implementing snappy DHTML interfaces very simple because
the Javascript interpreter inside browsers can interpret JSON directly,
without having to deal with browser differences in XML DOM
implementations.

Now if only monotone used standard X509 (*) certs I could imagine
writing a monotone web interface using a specialized web server that
talks over the pipe with a monotone back-end.

Cheers

Conrad

(*) Pet peeve of mine, having to deal with monotone keys, ssh keys, PGP
keys, X509 certs/keys and SILC keys which ALL use their own different
formats. Sigh.


On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 12:34 -0700, Larry Hastings wrote:
> Alex Queiroz wrote: 
> > > If the first step in writing your own monotone front-end was "call
> > > the Lua parser", it would make writing front-ends a major
> > > headache. Particularly for people not writing their front-end in
> > > C.
> > Why is that different from having to call the JSON parser?
> Because there are implementations of JSON for all popular (and many
> unpopular) languages.  Already we have front-ends for monotone written
> in many exotic languages*: OCaml, Ruby, Java, Perl, and Python.   All
> these languages have reference implementations of JSON, wheras none of
> them have implementations of Lua.  Worst-case, if there were no
> reference implementation of JSON for your chosen language, and you
> were forced to write the parser yourself, writing a JSON parser is far
> more approachable than writing a Lua parser.
> 
> Also, Lua is an entire scripting language, and as such has a much more
> complicated API than JSON.  So the setup code to parse some Lua input
> would be far more complicated than the equivalent code to setup
> parsing JSON.  Of course, this could be hidden in a library, but again
> such a library would almost certainly be written in C (or C++) and
> hard to use from other languages.
> 
> 
> larry
> 
> * In fact, it looks like none of the tools listed on montone's
> "GUIs/other tools" page was written in C!  I guess anyone who'd use
> monotone these days is already far enough off the beaten path that
> they don't mind living on the leading edge of linguistic civilization.
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-- 
Conrad Steenberg <address@hidden>
California Institute of Technology

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