[Cialug] how are you implementing "web services"

[Nathan Stien]

On Dec 7, 2007 1:59 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:
> If you've written software that exposes an externally accessible API (either
> public or for your own consumption) how are you doing it?

I used to have my IM client running on a machine that was not hooked
up to my speakers.  At the time I had a machine with GameOS hooked to
the speakers, and a KVM switch over to a debian desktop with Gaim
running on it.  I wanted to hear notifications when I got messages,
especially when gaming, but I did not want to run Gaim on the game
machine.  (Wanted my logs in the same place, a lot of games hate
alt-tab, the windows machine needed rebooting a lot, etc. etc.)

So late one friday night, after carousing with some comrades, I came
home and drunkenly wrote a 5-line xmlrpc server (in Python, natch) and
corresponding client such that I could request a sound to play on the
windows machine.  I then set the client program as the command to run
to play a sound in Gaim.  Set the server-side script to autorun  on
the windows box.  Absolutely disgusting way to solve that problem, but
(1) I found itt amusing and (2) it worked.

Of course, this is of little relevance to your question, since a
single-threaded http server written in Python is probably not an
enterprise-class solution...

Apropos: http://xkcd.com/353/
Make sure you read the tooltip, Josh More ;-)

- Nathan