[gambit-list] AWS, Termite, and Snow

Joe Hosteny jhosteny at gmail.com
Tue Jan 29 23:29:19 EST 2008


Hi all,

	First of all, let me preface this email with a disclaimer. I'm fairly  
new (again) to Scheme (last exposure was 10+ years ago in college).  
I'm still feeling my way around a bit, and have settled on Gambit,  
Chicken, and PLT, to a lesser extent. What I'm trying to say is - dumb  
questions may follow!

	I recently wrote a library to manage a cluster of machines in  
Amazon's EC2. I'm looking to totally rewrite it, and port it to Scheme  
in the process. I was also looking at having some facility for  
managing the cluster from within, with event monitoring via SQS or  
Termite. Currently, the library does that via polling from a machine  
external to the cluster. It's not ideal, but was sufficient to get my  
application working.

	As a start, I wrote a simple Snow package to do MD5 and SHA1 HMAC  
calculations (the AWS query string API uses SHA1 signatures). I  
started to look around for some utilities for URI parsing and encoding  
for use in Gambit, but didn't seem to find anything. So, first  
question - is anyone aware of a suitable package for this? Second  
question - if one doesn't exist, what do people do for regular  
expression parsing in Gambit?

	Since I haven't really fleshed out the new architecture, I'm not sure  
it's a requirement that I host code to both communicate events across  
the cluster and issue AWS API calls from within the same executable.  
So I guess an option would be to use Chicken for the HTTP stuff, and  
Gambit for Termite and making calls to the code written with Chicken  
(though at that point, it may make sense to just use one of the Ruby  
or Java libs for that part). I'd prefer not to, if for nothing more  
than to be able to contribute the AWS portion as a Chicken or Snow  
package.

	So, a few general questions follow. From recent mailing list  
discussions, it sounds like Termite will be targeted towards Gambit  
only, for the time being at least. Guillaume, is that correct? If not,  
do you have an idea of when it might be seen on other Schemes  
(specifically, Chicken or PLT)?

	Also, does anyone have a feel for what is going on with Snow? It  
seems like the traffic on the mailing list is a bit slow, and the  
number of packages is still relatively few. Don't get me wrong - my  
preference would be to contribute any work back as Snow packages, if  
at all feasible. That goes for lower level support packages as well,  
provided that I could find some collaborators. I also intend on making  
an AMI available with Gambit, Termite and any of the packages I  
produce pre-installed.

Cheers,

--Joe

www.maraudingrobots.com





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