The effort to redo Compass Game’s website is bearing much fruit. It’s still not ready to go live just yet, but the basic look & feel and the core databases which drive the site are in place. I’m currently waiting for more site-related content.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone back to doing some Crucible-related work. Crucible is my web applications / services platform. It is based on my own set of derived data protocols, which is timely given that Red Hat just decided to patent the process of requesting web services through CGI using the SOAP protocol. I looked at SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, a misnomer if ever there was one) a few years ago and found that it was overhead-heavy. My system uses 3 different protocols: XmlCGI (a variant of XML-RPC), YamlCGI (similar to XmlCGI but based on YAML) and JSON. XmlCGI and YamlCGI can be used for both input and output data transmission, while JSON is an output-only protocol geared toward Javascript browser request handling. XmlCGI and YamlCGI could be specified as output protocols if need be and would be primarily used for standalone, non-browser clients who wish to request services over the Internet.

Crucible is still in the alpha testing phase. I have some basic debug services working under a variety of protocols, but the support needs to be fleshed out for complex data types. Once I get past this hurdle, I can write some real web services.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Hackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.