Re: Apache Portable Runtime

[Peter Odding <xolox@...>]

Javier Guerra wrote:
> nice project!  i've heard good things about APR, but don't know what kind of 
> apps does it targets (apart from web servers, i guess).  can you throw a line 
> or two about this?

I'd describe it as a combination of a portable OS interface and general 
purpose library (mostly everything vital missing from the C standard 
libraries, which Lua uses). Amongst the modules are UUID, MD4/MD5, 
Base64, file i/o, pipes, sockets, filename matching (initial motivation 
to bind APR), directory manipulation, filepath manipulation, string 
transcoding, the list goes on[1]... A few projects currently using APR[2]:

 * Apache HTTP Server
 * Flood load tester
 * FreeSwitch
 * JXTA-C
 * mod_jk v2 and mod_webapp (part of Tomcat)
 * mod_spin
 * Subversion
 * libbtt (part of mod_bt)
 * Bloglines
 * Various Covalent Products

*Bitfields*
JG> my vote goes for numbers
AQ> Make your function accept a list of strings
RL> As always, I'd suggest using strings

Strings do seem to be `the Lua way'. And less prone to mistakes. Still 
considering...

RL> Are these really too expensive to retrieve, compared with the 
overhead of a scripting language? Otherwise, it's probably easier all 
round to just retrieve all of them.

I've considered this myself and this is the approach Perl, Python and 
Ruby have taken. However apr_stat() also returns permissions which I 
represent in three tables, user, group and world. Now if someone needs 
just the mtime of say a 1000 files this will require 4000 tables while a 
1000 lua_Number's would have sufficed. My current implementation, 
apr.stat(path, what), has two modes: if just one property is requested, 
this is the property returned. More than one property means a table is 
returned. This works really well for filesystem-entry-type testing, for 
example:

if apr.stat(path, 't') == 'directory' then ...

And I'm *certainly* not going to implement 
filectime/filemtime/fileatime/file_exists/file_readable/is_directory/etc.. 
functions like PHP has :P

*Microseconds*
JG> i like fractional seconds.  i.e.  1.0 = 1 sec, 0.001 = 1msec, 
0.000001 = 1usec
AQ> Use fractional seconds.
RL> I like seconds.

Good, my preference as well. Thank you all!

 - Peter

[1] http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/1.2/modules.html
    http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/1.2/modules.html
[2] http://apr.apache.org/projects.html