trac-atompp progress; APE questions

I'm working on (among other things) finishing up wiki support in my trac-atompp plugin. I'm nearly done, I think. In order to make sure it's "valid", I'm using Tim Bray's APE (albeit from CVS). However, I've got a few questions about some of the errors:

8. ! 53 of 53 entries in Page 1 of Entry collection lack app:date elements.

From the source, it looks like it should actually say app:edited. But, why is it giving an error? According to draft 14, section 10.2, Atom Entry elements in Collection documents SHOULD contain one "app:edited" element, and MUST NOT contain more than one. Perhaps the messages should conform to RFC 2119 instead of lumping in all of the SHOULDs with the MUSTs, or something.

49. ? Can't update new entry with PUT: No Content [Dialog]
50. ! Couldn't delete the entry that was posted: No Content [Dialog]

I don't really understand why HTTP status code 204 (No Content) isn't allowed for either PUT or DELETE, seeing as RFC 2616 says that it is a perfectly valid response for both actions.

Trac-AtomPP progress, 2007-01-23

I finally got myself out of my Trac plugin coding slump. Genshi is really making this a whole lot easier; I don't really know why I was manually generating XML from trees in the first place.

I am very grateful for the existence of Joe Gregorio's Atom Publishing Protocol test suite. There are only a couple of nits about it — first, it doesn't seem to play well with Multi-version installs of wxPython (seems to require 2.6, perhaps 2.5 [I only have 2.4 and 2.6 on my computer]), so I cooked up a really simple patch for that. Secondly, my wiki collection feed generates some warnings via Feed Validator, but in the logging pane, it records them as errors. Since it doesn't affect the functionality, I merely consider that a minor usability bug. But, this really doesn't seem to be meant for end users, so...whatever.

Anyway, for my capstone, I'm only working on the wiki part. GET is done, and POST is nearly done. DELETE is done in theory (haven't tested it out yet), and PUT still needs to be converted. POST and PUT now require some implementation of ElementTree to be installed, in order to parse the Atom Entry input. As an aside, ElementTree's find*() methods are really poor substitutes for XPath. Also, this implementation utilizes the Atom MIME type parameter draft whenever possible.

Reminder: Bazaar URL is: http://bzr.malept.com/trac-atompp

Several items

The last post was 1.5 months ago, awesome. Anyhow, here are some thoughts on stuff I've done/explored in the computer realm during that time:

• Beryl is awesome. Too bad it doesn't play well with tvtime, or else I'd permanently enable it and all the associated settings. Also, my video card is one of those crippled ones (ATI Radeon 9250SE), so it's a bit slow as well.
• My capstone project is in full swing. I've mostly stopped using my hand-rolled Atom parser/generator, since I got stuck on how to implement extensions. For generation, I've switched to using Genshi templates. Genshi has a pretty nice templating language for both XML and text based documents. For parsing, I think I'm going to use lxml or ElementTree, depending on how well XPath is supported.
• Given the amount of attention that OpenID has been given in the blogosphere lately, I was thinking about how it could be used to integrate with the UWNetID system. Unfortunately, I found that it was rather difficult to modify the current implementations in order to add such support. So, I'm currently writing a PHP5 class + mini-application to be an OpenID server. So far, I have the association mode completed, and the checkid modes are in progress. I am proud of myself for actually implementing the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, since while I am fascinated with cryptography, my math skills in that area are...lacking. It's also nice to refresh my PHP skills, as I haven't programmed in PHP5 (which gives you some idea as to the last time that I coded in PHP).
• Over winter break, I attempted to port modular X to MinGW, as the Xming project (which is awesome) uses the old, monolithic build process. I've built all the Xorg server (and its dependencies) successfully, except that the OpenGL code for Windows has not been updated with the rest of the server's codebase. That sort of modifications are pretty far out of my porting abilities, unfortunately. This project also gave me some experience with git. My take: it's extremely annoying to use git directly — use a frontend to it such as cogito instead. My personal preference is still Bazaar, though.
• I wrote a Python module in C for my on-again, off-again, DC client project. I have a post on that sitting in my queue and will post it at some point when I finish and/or remember it.
• I eagerly await the day when Deepest Sender supports the GData Blogger API. Maybe in the spring, if it's not there, I'll write it.
• Oh right, the new URL for this weblog is http://blogger.malept.com/.