Announcing the TRIVIAL-SOCKETS interface for undemanding network clients#

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 02:25:13 +0000

Announcing the TRIVIAL-SOCKETS interface for undemanding network clients.

Having once already tried to define a flexible networking interface that would anticipate most of the weird stuff that people might want to do with an underlying BSD sockets interface, I'm now going to the other extreme: TRIVIAL-SOCKETS has one exported function, which takes a hostname and port to connect to and returns a stream.

FOO> (with-open-stream (s (trivial-sockets:open-stream "www.google.com" 80))
       (format s "HEAD / HTTP/1.0~%Host: www.google.com~%~%")
       (force-output s) 
       (read-line s))
"HTTP/1.0 200 OK
"

OK, you get the idea. Mostly unimplemented so far (it kind of works on SBCL, but not totally), but please see texinfo spec and so forth at http://cvs.telent.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trivial-sockets/. It's never going to be sb-bsd-sockets, but we could still aspire to write a spec in English that's a bit tighter than the CLOCC PORT stuff. And make it asdf-installable, of course.