lab 79 - acme javascript

NAME

lab 79 - acme javascript

NOTES

I'm excited about today's lab. I hope others pick up on this and experiment with it because I think some cool acme clients would come of it.

The idea behind this lab is to mix together acme, javascript and json web services.

I've been poking around at inferno's javascript, hoping to improve it. The best way of doing that is to start using it more heavily. In earlier labs I created a tool called js that ran javascript scripts outside of charon. But without knowing what set of host objects to build it has languished.

Looking to use javascript more, I've been taking another look at web services APIs, and noticing that JSON is getting strong support, especially from Google and Yahoo. I'm pleased about this, since the SOAP stuff looked so horrid. So I really want to pull JSON web services into inferno using javascript. But web services don't work too well when text is just output to the command line, they need more interaction.

So the natural thing to do is build an acme client. Acme clients can be built using shell but I don't think that is ideal. Inferno shell can really show its limits when used as a programming language. And for new users javascript is probably an easier and more familiar language to get to grips with.

I decided in this lab to create a javascript command that includes acmewin as a host object. I also added a host readlUrl function meant for calling json services. Together I hope this makes it really simple for anyone to put together an acme client using data pulled from the internet.

The command is called Jwin and is envoked with the name of a javascript file.

% Jwin -f file.js

It opens one window for the script to operate on.

I created an Acmewin host object, that is instantiated before the script is run. It has methods that mirror the acmewin library, read, writebody, tagwrite, name, clean, select, setaddr, replace, readall.

It also has two event properties, onlook and onexec, which should be assigned functions if you want to react to mouse clicks of the middle and right buttons.

Here's the simplest javascript client.

Acmewin.onexec = function(x) {
 Acmewin.writebody("onexec:" + x + "\n");
}

Acmewin.onlook = function(x) {
 Acmewin.writebody("looking at:" + x + "\n");
}

I still need to write a postUrl method. I'd like a blogger interface myself. Even though most google APIs allow read access using JSON they only allow posts in Atom format. But given the Javascript object it shouldn't be hard to build the xml string for the post.

The web access is through svc/webget/webget, so this should be started before using Jwin.

Below is a longer example to give you more of a flavor of an acmeclient written in javascript. Try this out and see how fast you can come up with you own acme client.

var undefined;
var user = "caerwyn";
var baseurl = "http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/";
var count = "?count=20";

var tagmode = false;
function getfeeds(tag)
{
 if(tag != undefined){
  var s = System.readUrl(baseurl + user + "/" + tag);
 }else {
  var s = System.readUrl(baseurl + user + count);
 }
 eval(s);
 for (var i =0, item; item = Delicious.posts[i]; i++) {
  Acmewin.writebody(i + "/\t" + item.d + "\n");
 }
}

function gettags()
{
 var s = System.readUrl(baseurl + "tags/" + user);
 eval(s);
 for(var i in Delicious.tags){
  Acmewin.writebody(i + "(" + Delicious.tags[i] +")\n");
 } 
}

getfeeds();
Acmewin.tagwrite(" Posts Tags ");
Acmewin.name("del.icio.us/caerwyn");

Acmewin.onexec = function(cmd) {
 if(cmd == "Posts"){
  Acmewin.replace(",", "");
  getfeeds();
  tagmode = false;
  return true;
 }else if(cmd == "Tags"){
  Acmewin.replace(",", "");
  gettags();
  tagmode = true;
  return true;
 }
 return false;
}

Acmewin.onlook = function(x) {
 var n = parseInt(x);
 if(n >=0 && n < Delicious.posts.length){
  Acmewin.writebody(Delicious.posts[n].u + "\n");
  return true;
 }
 if(tagmode){
  Acmewin.replace(",", "");
  getfeeds(x.split("(")[0]);
  tagmode = false;
  return true;
 }
  
 return false;
}

And here's what the client looks like:

FILES

lab 79 code