Since My Last Post…
There’s been little progress on Crucible since my last post. Most of this is due to the fact that I was busy hiking in the White Mountains. To whit:
The Mount Jackson hike was done as a part of the Flags on the 48 9/11 Memorial Hike. While not an unqualified success, nothing catastrophic occurred and a reasonably good time was had by all. It was only the third large group that I’ve led and I can apply the lessons learned for future hikes.
As far as Crucible goes, I’ve been doing some research on cryptography, authentication and general site security as well as designing some useful services. After jotting down numerous notes, it hit me that my basic underlying framework still was not fully in place. Support for several data types, including arrays (most useful those), have not even been implemented, much less tested. As I started down that road, it also occurred to me that using the browser/Ajax/service loop to debug server-side code was a gigantic time-wasting pain in the ass. So this morning, I copied services.fcgi to a simple Ruby script called T, which serves as my test bench application. T, like the production Ajax handler script, uses the same service scripts, exception stack and folder hierarchy as its production brother. The differences are as follows:
- The log file name is simply T.log
- Services are not received via the FCGI.each loop. Instead, XML file payloads are supplied via T’s command line.
- No signal interrupts are needed.
It took me roughly a half hour to implement this.
The nice thing about this is that I might be able to parley this code into a test bench service if Effluency 2.0 ever supports user-developed service creation. We’ll see.