[Xastir] Feature idea for Xastir

[Gerry Creager]

William McKeehan wrote:
> On Tue, October 9, 2007 2:46 pm, Brad Douglas wrote:
>> Are you suggesting that everyone have a working http server on their
>> local machine?  That is quite an excessive (and generally insecure)
>> method of accomplishing the given goal, locally.
> 
> Well, I'm thinking about a limited http server as part of Xastir, not
> necessarily on port 80 (the default http port). It would be similar to the
> current Xastir server port. I think we could find code for a simple http
> engine to incorporate into the Xastir code that is neither excessive nor
> insecure.

Lots of (real) security professionals will ask serious questions about 
standing up a web server on a port besides 80, 8080 or 8000.  Be 
prepared to have to answer those questions.  Also, I cringe everytime I 
think of the port-scamming APRS-IS is already involved in.  We should 
have written the spec, gone to IANA and gotten a port-list, and 
implemented it.

>> IMO, wxPython is the way to go for GUI development.
> 
> My suggested approach would let people develop a GUI in multiple environments
> and provide a standard "API" to facilitate this development.

That works if we're looking at exposing an interface and expecting folks 
to write to it, ala SOAP.  Unfortunately, then, every new SOAP service 
starts looking like a "one-off" and the eventual consolidation of WSDLs 
and SOAP implementations will result in... xml-rpc, which has already 
been around for quite awhile.

>> I highly recommend you look into REST[1] before proceeding.
>>
>> [1]
>> http://www.workflowresearch.com/Publications/PDF/MIZU.JENI.KESW-DSS(2004).pdf

gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
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