Extracting information from a webservice

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 17 January 2013 04:33, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> pointing this back to the mailing list...
>
> Pierre-Yves <pingou at pingoured.fr> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 03:50:37PM -0800, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>>> What we really need is someone to write the little interface that can
>>> grab locations / gps coordinates from the web service. I'm still too
>>> busy with other things to get to that.
>>
>> I was thinking maybe I could try to draft something, apparently even if it's bad
>> it's enough to motivate people to move on it :)
>>
>> What I was wondering is if I should look at exporting the information in xml in
>> addition to the json I use now. I might make more sense / be easier for the
>> client to parse xml rather than json. Since I have done neither in C, I'm
>> calling for your wisdom (as it might mean adjusting the webservice before trying
>> to do something in the client).
>
> I haven't done this from C, either. Has anyone written a webservice
> interface from C?

i've done that a long time ago.

libsoup can be used, which is pretty straight forward...
http://csoap.sourceforge.net/

in fact subsurface already depends on it, since its used in the
in-bound map gps widget.
also, libsoup itself depends on libxml2.

subsurface.exe <-> some online CGI <-> other clients
is not a difficult concept.

> What's easier to extract? My guess would be "we have
> an XML parser, let's just use that", but I really don't know...
>

i would use XML, but it depends on the structural requirements, and
how the structure will grow in the future..
i've been trying to follow the discussion in the other threads, but
can't really say i understand said requirements.

if someone starts on that i can provide feedback / hints, as far as my
understanding of the subject goes, of course.

lubomir
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