[Neworleans-pm] Re: Group Projects (was Re: hello)

[Brett D. Estrade]

I started PerlXUL a while ago, but have not really had a chance to do too
much - it is up on sourceforge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/perlxul/ ... As an extension of that, I
am interested in creating a module that would allow one to easily map XML
tags to callbacks - allowing one to create an XML based language that
does *something*.  This is also something I want to incorporate into
PerlXUL.  

I encourage all who are interested to join the PerlXUL project, but be
warned that it is still in the "planning" phase.

The ideas about the cable/dns host failover project and the label maker
sound awesome.  I wrote a dirty php script that will sort addresses for
bulk mailing according to ADC/zip code, and that can easily be turned
into a perl implementation.  That would allow for some useful sorting
routines.

The idea about the connected cable/dsl machines also sounds very
interesting.  It sounds like it could quickly become a distributed
storage system that not only would provide failover capabilities, but
allow for load balancing among a group of machines.  Kind of
bit-torrent-ish, but not.  The only issue that I see with just changing
the DNS records is that they take time to propagate throughout the 'net,
so it wouldn't be a complete solution.  The objective would be to have a
the same file on multiple system that would be called at the same time -
winner takes all.  The only problem with that is that if the server that
is doing the main requesting goes down, you are screwed.  This sounds a
little bit like the freecache project I saw on /. a few days ago.

Are there project pages for any of these ideas posted anywhere?

Brett

On Tue, 18 May 2004 10:55:12 -0500 (CDT), "Dave Cash" <dave at gnofn.org>
said:
> On Tue, 18 May 2004, Brett D. Estrade wrote:
> 
> > I may be able to make a couple - Friday is just a bad day for me.  What
> > kind projects are you all looking at doing?
> 
> The project Mike talked about is something he has been calling
> Cooperative DNS, but that doesn't really fully describe what it aims
> to do.
> 
> Mike can probably explain it better than I can, but basically it
> would allow people who host web sites or other services over their
> DSL/cable connections to have some failover protections if their
> DSL were to go down.
> 
> It would run as a P2P app, allow up to six computers to form a sort
> of ring.  If a computer in the ring were to lose connectivity, then
> another computer in the ring would immediately change DNS records
> (for both SMTP and HTTP traffic) to make itself the new host.  Then
> it would collect and hold any incoming mail until the downed machine
> could recover.  It would also provide access to the web site via a
> local copy (if the web site on the downed machine were dynamically
> generated, then a static version of the downed site would be used
> instead).
> 
> On Friday, we discussed that our first step will be to get together
> to design the application.  I imagine that the design document(s)
> will appear on the wiki, and at that time it will make more sense
> than it probably did above in my description.
> 
> A project idea I had was to create a clean, easy-to-use,
> object-oriented CPAN package that would allow for the merging of
> record data into a printable output.  Originally, I just wanted to
> make a module that would take some data input and produce a PDF i
> could use to print labels.  But now I think it would be better to
> generalize the I/O, something along the lines of SQL::Translator's
> Parser/Producer model (for this project it would be something like
> Data/Output).  It would basically be an application of a word
> processor's "merge" capability, but without the word processor.
> 
> Once this pacakge were written, I'm imagining it could be used
> something like this:
> 
>  #!/usr/bin/perl
> 
>  use strict;
>  use Merge::Simple;
> 
>  my $m = new Merge::Simple;
>  $m->source( 'mysql', 'username', 'password' );
>  $m->fields( qw/name address1 address2 city state zip country/ );
>  $m->filter( { state => 'LA' } );
>  $m->sort( 'zip' );
>  $m->template( 'tt2', 'label.tt2' );
>  $m->layout( 'avery-3550' );
> 
>  $m->produce( 'pdf' );
> 
> Or something like that (I just made up the name Merge::Simple--I'm
> open to other possibilities).
> 
> I know there are other things out there which do parts of what I'm
> proposing, but nothing (that I know of) with this kind of flexible,
> extensible design.  The work would mostly be in writing the various
> subclasses, so that it would support a variety of data sources
> (MySQL, Postgres, Class::DBI, Alzabo, etc.) a variety of templating
> solutions (Template Toolkit, HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, etc.), a
> variety of layouts (all known print labels, business cards, etc.)
> and a variety of output types (PDF, LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, XML,
> etc.).  In the case of each of these, it would hopefully be
> relatively easy to design a custom solution through subclassing.
> 
> So that's my idea, in a nutshell.
> 
> If you have any project ideas, we'd love to hear them.  I saw on
> your website that you're working on a PerlXUL project.  That sounds
> very interesting.  I don't know too much about XUL (I've done a
> little reading on it, but until I really use it, I'm sure it won't
> sink all the way in).
> 
> Take care,
> 
> Dave
> 
> /L\_/E\_/A\_/R\_/N\_/T\_/E\_/A\_/C\_/H\_/L\_/E\_/A\_/R\_/N\
> Dave Cash                              Power to the People!
> Frolicking in Fields of Garlic               Right On-Line!
> dave at gnofn.org                                  Dig it all.
=====
http://www.brettsbsd.net/~estrabd

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