[Oberon] Text search + FTP

[John Drake]

--- edgar at edgarschwarz.de wrote:
> John Drake <jmdrake_98 at yahoo.com>
>
> > Wiki, but I wasn't sure if that was appropriate.
> At least it should work :-) So if you like you can
> try it.

Yeah.  I had actually pasted the code there at first
but then thought "is the the best way to use a 
Wiki"?  I dunno.  It's not that much code relatively
speaking (I was only pasting the two new procedures
that I had written and a new module).

> OTOH after months of being occupied with other more
> pressing matters
> I started my WebDAV server on webdav.ethz.ch again.
> And I will have look into the problems there are.
> The difficult part is that I fear that these are not
> WebDAV but TCP/IP/HTTP
> problems.

Good!  Glad to see progress on this again.
 
> Bad news :-(
> But I don't think it's possible for the (very small)
> Oberon community
> to provide a better browser. Even if it's perhaps
> not giving
> many academic laurels I think that an OS which
> hasn't at
> least some decent capabilities for browsing the Web
> doesn't have
> a great appeal to new people. So I can only beg ETH
> to invest some
> energy e.g. to integrate the good stuff from
> WebNavigator (Some support for
> frames and CSS) into the standard browser.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting on that.  Back
when Juice was a possible alternative to Java I 
made some suggestions to Michael Franz on
ways to make it more viable.  (Such as porting
the plugin to Linux, providing more Slim Binary
backends than just x86, 68K and PPC or making it
easier for others to port this, GUI support
ect.)  He told me these were all good ideas
but that they weren't "accademically 
interesting".  And yes, Dr. Franz is at UCI
rather than ETH, but I seem the same thing
there at Linz also.  There are a lot of good
products (Lola, Oberon-D, Switcherland) that
are at a "really nice, but not being actively
developed" state.

Anyway I wouldn't discount the Oberon 
community just because of it's small size.
Programming teams of a few programmers have
written decent browsers.  You did a decent
job on WebDAV all by your lonesome.  The
Oberon System 3 community itself will need
to come together and do some things.

I think the problem of extending the Web
browser is doable if we work out a few
logistics. (Source stored as ASCII or
as Text.  Project hosted at ETH or at
SourceForge.  Project managed by WebDAV
or CVS).  Perhaps a successful 
colaborative project could finally spur
more of a general colaboration spirit
that's so desperately needed by this
small community?

> A decent browser is basic stuff nowadays which is
> expected of an OS of any
> value. Or what about a WINE for Oberon ? I just
> installed it on my Debian
> today to see what it's capable of. 

Hmmmm...size wise comparing Oberon to Windows to
me is like comparing a compact pickup to a
tractor trailer.  I can better visualize a
tractor trailer carring a pickup than I can
a pickup pulling a tractor trailer.  In other
words I think the best "Windows/Oberon"
enviornment is the currect solution of hosting
Windows on top of Oberon rather than trying to
host Oberon on top of Windows.  I do recall
someone at ETH once saying that they used VNC
to access a Netscape browser as their browsing
solution.  (That still seems cludgy to me).

I think it would be more realistic to port
the Java AWT to Oberon.  BlueBottle can already
support the Java VM.  If we had AWT support
than Oberon could run one of the myriad of 
Java web browser there are out there, including
"Amaya" which is available from the w3c 
organization.
 
> > Anyway Google does support XMLRPC.  And since 
> > we have an XMLRPC client it should be possible to
> > build a Google search client in Oberon.
> I saw that you tried to upload XMLRPC.Mod to
> webdav.ethz.ch and that you
> didn't succeed. The file only has 512 bytes and half
> of them are junk.
> I assume that there are still problems somewhere in
> TCP/IP which are probably
> also the cause of the FTP problems discussed
> recently.

I had forgotten about that!  Well I tried to upload
again today.  (Using MS Explorer "web folders" this
time).  I got to 1.2K!  (The file is actually 5K).
Still that's progress. ;)  Then I went back to
Win Aos.  It took 3 attempts, but I got
it up!

Attempt 1: 512 bytes
Attempt 2: 4K then garbage
Attempt 3: 5K and fine!

That reminds me.  I reported earlier to this 
list that I was having problems connecting to 
the Internet using Win Aos from behind the
firewall at work.  Well I still can't hit the
net from my desktop machine (Win 2K) but I can
hit it fine from a personal laptop (Win ME).
This is just strange, but I'm glad it's at
least somewhat working.  I'm not sure at this
point if it's an operating system issue or
simply some strange configuration issue.
If anyone else here is using Win Aos on a
Win2K machine from behind a firewall please
let me know.

Oh, side note.  It seems that Google has stopped
supporting XMLRPC and is now only supporting
SOAP.  (I can't even ping the Google XMLRPC
server) Bummer! And I found this out after I
got the interface for the Google client to 
clean compile.  Double bummer!  Anyway I made
some improvements to the XMLRPC code in the
process so it wasn't a total waste.  I guess
an Oberon Google client will have to wait
for the BlueBottle SOAP package.  I know the
XO/2 system has a SOAP package.  Has anybody
else here looked into this?  What would it
take to get this running under BlueBottle
or NO?

http://www.xo2.org/Pages/download.html

Regards,

John M. Drake


		
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