Programming I’ve Been Up To

I haven’t posted in a while, and whilst I have a rather lengthy post brewing in my Home folder I thought I’d make a shorter one for the time being.

I’ve been playing around in Python, C and C++ and aside from my usual experiments I’ve been trying to push (literally) a new blogging, and general notification, system by getting XMPP PubSub integrated into more applications. The big problem I’ve found is that there is very little to work with from an application point of view, most development efforts seem to be web-focused.

After a little play around with Gloox it became obvious that its PubSub support, whilst probably going to be awesome when it’s finished, is unusable at the moment (no amount of messing could even get their example to work :( ). Since my C++ is laughably bad, Gloox would end up releasing their PubSub support before I’d become capable of helping. Thus I decided I’d write a PubSub-capable library in Python using xmpppy (both of which I’m very familiar with).

I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be taking shape nicely. I started by essentially writing methods to send every sending example given in the XEP-0060 specification. This I originally did by sticking strings together since XML libraries are usually over my head, but now that they’re all there I’ve decided to take the plunge into using XML programmatically and have learned to use elementtree to rewrite these methods (rewriting them as I test them).

In the past couple of days I’ve been working on dealing with the replies being sent back from the server, and have implemented a way for replies to be sent to handling functions defined within the original message’s sending method. The reply handlers add to and alter an XML tree containing all known servers, their capabilities, their nodes, node configurations, subscribers, etc. which can be used by applications as ‘get’ capability. After the handling functions have 100% coverage I’d like to add a set of abstracted methods (true getters and setters) to make using the library more Object Oriented, more Python-like and more intuitive. This would allow the internal workings of the library (which are probably a very poor design due to my inexperience) to be completely rewritten again and again in future versions without breaking API compatibility.

Once the sending and receiving are working I’m thinking of making a translator program which receives PubSub notifications and writes them to local files. In this way it would be trivial to receive Atom-over-PubSub in any current news reader capable of reading Atom (which is pretty much all, and with converters it is all). This would basically involve subscribing to some PubSub nodes, logging in with the converter, giving it a file name to write to then adding this file as an Atom feed in a news reader. This is obviously a temporary solution since it still involves polling, but at least that polling is local and not networked. After that I want to add support to an existing, or make my own, offline blogging application. After that I have a few nice ideas bouncing around in my head :)

For those who are bored by text manipulation I don’t blame you :) Here is a little Public Domain program I’ve written which draws pretty patterns in a window instead :) Kind of looks like moonlight filtering down through clearings in a forest canopy…. or thousands of simultaneous random walks brightening and tinting every pixel they cross :) To run it you’ll need Python and Pygame installed, then run it however you’d run a Python program on your system :) As a Python program it can be opened and changed with a text editor, so anyone wanting to understand programming a little can play around with the settings (the interesting ones have comments)

Oh, I’ve also discovered that my previous dislike of honey has changed, since it’s now awesome. That is all.