Gnuserv

Gnuserv

[Paul Michael Reilly]

After a few days of playing with Gnuserv I'm ready to heave the beast.
Most of the culprit is "Unable to connect, connection refused" type
messages.  So far it has actually worked once and failed inumerable
times.  Running under gdb and stepping through the source code has me
wondering why I would inflict such pain upon myself.  Why not just
have some fooserv.el spawn a real Java server for which so much freely
available code exists, use http to enable a wealth of clients and keep
the server so simple that it just passes a form for Emacs to eval and
returns the result.  Makes sense to me.

Of course using Java means it most likely can not be a part of Gnu
Emacs, the only downside that I can see.  But making it a separate
project is not so bad.  Emacsclient/Emacsserver fill the need for the
non-Java world. 

Anyone care to play devil's advocate?

-pmr

Re: Gnuserv

[Jason Rumney]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> Most of the culprit is "Unable to connect, connection refused" type
> messages.
What makes you think rewriting gnuserv using another programming 
language will solve these problems?

Re: Gnuserv

[David Hansen]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 11:40:12 +0100 Jason Rumney wrote:

> Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
>> Most of the culprit is "Unable to connect, connection refused" type
>> messages.
> What makes you think rewriting gnuserv using another
> programming language will solve these problems?

These days where most machines have more than enough memory
you have to try hard to fulfill the "Constantly Swapping" part
of the Emacs acronym.  Java seems promising to me.

David

Re: Gnuserv

[Stefan Monnier]

> After a few days of playing with Gnuserv I'm ready to heave the beast.
> Most of the culprit is "Unable to connect, connection refused" type
> messages.  So far it has actually worked once and failed inumerable
> times.  Running under gdb and stepping through the source code has me
> wondering why I would inflict such pain upon myself.  Why not just
> have some fooserv.el spawn a real Java server for which so much freely
> available code exists, use http to enable a wealth of clients and keep
> the server so simple that it just passes a form for Emacs to eval and
> returns the result.  Makes sense to me.

Have you looked at emacsclient and server.el?


        Stefan

Re: Gnuserv

[Paul Michael Reilly]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
>> Most of the culprit is "Unable to connect, connection refused" type
>> messages.
> What makes you think rewriting gnuserv using another programming 
> language will solve these problems?

Because in fifteen minutes I had a server/client pair working just 
dandy, server spawned from Emacs, based on the Java KnockKnock tutorial 
code.  Now to flesh it out by working on the protocol, where I should be 
working, not wondering what freaking network issue in the C code is 
causing an inability to connect.  And it handles multiple connections 
just fine.  Bottom line is that with C code, the coder has to worry 
about OS dependencies and quirks.  With Java (and some other languages 
no doubt) the VM eliminates these issues in a platform independent way.
Were I a C based networking guru, this is a non issue but I'm not and I 
have the itch so following the path of least resistance is the path for me.

However, I do suspect that Jetty is a better answer in the long run 
because it opens up http.  First things first though.

-pmr

Re: Gnuserv

[Richard Stallman]

Are you developing this on GCJ and GNU Classpath?
Or using Sun's non-free platform?

Re: Gnuserv

[Paul Michael Reilly]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Are you developing this on GCJ and GNU Classpath?
> Or using Sun's non-free platform?

I will attempt to use them if only to see how much progress has been 
made since the last time I tried.  I will undoubtedly use a servlet 
based access to an Emacs server at some point but it probably won't be 
for a while.  Meanwhile I do need to get Eclipse running with the Emacs 
plugin.  I took a closer look this morning at having it use emacsclient 
rather than gnuclient and it looks promising.

-pmr