IRIX and Jigsaw, other points

Hi

Thanks to Anselm for his very fast fix to my FormResource.lookup problem
- it all works !

Some points about Jigsaw and the SGI port of 1.02 to IRIX 5.3

1) You need to use systune(1M) to set the kernel parameter svr3pipe to
   0 to turn on bi-directional pipes - this is not
   sufficiently documented. Symptoms are InputStream.available() throws
   IOException when used on file handle returned
   from Process.getInputStream(). Prevents non-blocking io on process
   streams !
   
2) There are intermittent crashes with core dump signals - as of yet I
   have been unable to trace this, but it was happening *before* I
   loaded any of my own libraries ... ;-) I think this is in the SGI
   port, possibly in their thread code ( IRIX threads are *weird*.. )
   
Some other points

1) I have a crocked version of FileResource which runs SGMLS on the
   submitted PUT data to validate it against the HTML 3.2DTD. It is a
   crock because it is not clear how filters apply to PUT methods. I've
   overloaded PUT - but a filter seems a neater way of doing this.
   One nice point is that Netscape displays the failure message so you
   can feed back the first couple of K of errors ( Question : Is there
   a length limit on server failure replies ? Is it actual or
   recommended ? )
  
2) Unified searching API - see my next message ;-)

3) I have some primitive interface functions to the database Indexplus
   ( Not OBDC complient ) - if anyone wants them. They are *very*
   primitive, but just about work.
   
4) Is there a possibility of getting the StoreManager to run the
   finalizers when it does it's GC ?
   
5) How hunger is the attribute manager ? How does it do it's GC ? 
   Can you intercept resource dump/restore to throw away resources and
   re-create them if they have not been modified from the defaults ?
   Why ? I have a database of potentially a few hundred thousand
   entries. When I use my database interface to get the search results,
   I'm using form cards to display groups of 40 records per card, with
   deferred creation of the cards. However, if I do page to a card I
   suddenly require 40 new resource. Over time, this will accumulate
   considerably. Now, each time I get a record, the meta data in the
   resource is generated from the record itself - seems stupid to have
   to store this as well, and knowing JAVA I just have to override the
   right methods... ;-)
   
6) Is there a 'text/html only' field for form cards for, e.g. section
   headings or comments ? With left/center/right justification ?
   ( Aside - Style sheets ? ;-) )
   
7) Form cards are nice, but I have a set of code for 'database views'
   which implements a whole language for HTML page description for
   records - in JAVA ;-) Any takers ? I'm working on getting it
   interfaced to Jigsaw.

8) Correctness of HTML generated by Jigsaw - I've noticed that
   sometimes Jigsaw generates non-HTML v3.2 html - any chance of a slow
   move to merging this in the main stream ?
   
9) CVS - got it all working. Re-reads the directory a lot tho - maybe a
   bit more intelligence in caching the directory ? Or a 'Force Reload'
   button ? ( Just stick a TTL in the HTML header and let the browser
   handle it ? ) Maybe you should document the cvs.root variable a bit
   better ( Sardonic ;-) )
   
Hope this is of interest/thought provoking

Joel
-- 
Joel.Crisp@bris.ac.uk | ets-webmaster@bris.ac.uk  | "I remember Babylon" -
Software Engineer, Institute of Learning and      |        Arthur C Clarke
Research Technology, University of Bristol, UK    |
http://www.ets.bris.ac.uk/                        |

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 1996 09:16:12 UTC