mod_atom Status

People who are interested in the software shouldn’t have to read the acres of prose in the mod_atom intro, so I’ll just keep this one up to date.

The code is currently here.

2007/06/27 · Updated iterator.c to fix pkeane’s bug while retaining concurrency safety.

Tested on a vanilla Debian box, and the compiler there emitted a couple of warnings one of which turned out to be an actual bug (that the unit tests hadn’t caught, sigh). Whatever, it ran fine. Like I said, programs written in the C language are portable. Write Once Run Anywhere, baby. Well, with APR anyhow.

2007/06/29 · Collection paging now seems to work (but only with “next” links). (BTW, did you know you can’t subtract one apr_time_t from another and expect to return the result in a qsort comparator? I wanna go back to Ruby.)

The README file is no longer just a copy of Josh Rotenberg’s.

2007/07/10 · Ouf, what a struggle. The last piece, supporting PUT on a Media Resource, and consequently updating its Media Link Entry and making sure that collection got sorted, chewed up all my time during the Berlin week when I wasn’t child-minding or wedding-going or drinking beer. Also, I had to add a bunch of tests to the Ape to cover this function.

On the downside, the routine that generates the XML for a Collection feed now has eleven (!) arguments, and thus screams out for refactoring.

On the upside, a lot of mod_atom’s work consists of pulling apart and gluing together directory paths for entries, collections, and so on. There are a lot of ways to get the slashes wrong, so I had lots of bugs where paths had two adjacent slashes, or worse, none. So I wrote a nice little join routine that glues segments together with only one slash regardless of how sloppy you are passing them in; this allowed simplifications here and there all over the place and is a lot more robust. Of course, wiring it in made many unit tests fail, and then lots of Ape tests too, but this is what tests are for, right?

I think I’m going to park the mod_atom code at Google Code or somewhere for the moment and call this release 0.7. The idea is that 0.8 will add HTML generation and 0.9 non-destructive editing.

2007/07/11 · It’s parked, for the moment anyhow, at Google Code. I had a little trouble because on OS X, the svn you get from Fink doesn’t seem to have ssl. That’s OK, it turns out Collabnet has up-to-date OS X binaries. Thanks to Greg Stein for the pointer; he also noted that I might want to switch mod_atom to use a few simple directives inside an httpd-config <Location> block, then I wouldn’t have to do my own prefix mapping. I’ll have to think about that one a bit; sure sounds plausible.

2007/07/25 · I started working on sanitization code. There’s the beginnings of a discussion on the issues over on the googlecode Wiki. For now, I only try to sanitize text constructs with type="xhtml", with a whitelist-based design (and whitelists, too) stolen from the Universal Feed Parser.

That code’s checked in, and there are tests for it in the Ape. I still haven’t figured out what to do about type="html".

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