[PD] [psql] object hand-holding

[Jamie Bullock]

On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 10:39 +0100, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Thomas Grill hat gesagt: // Thomas Grill wrote:
> 
> > it's unfortunate that you are not thrilled using flext.
> > Since flext uses the PD api to get lists or other messages into 
> > secondary inlets there's nothing to stop you from doing the same in 
> > psql. The magic words are "proxy objects" which you might find in the 
> > mailing list archive (or the flext source code, if you prefer that).
> > Needless to say flext saves you from coding these things yourself in a 
> > time consuming manner and makes other things really easy, once you got 
> > it running. You could also compile pool then.
> 
> The Python and Lua objects also support arbitrary messages on their
> inlets. Both languages have DB modules for just about every DB,
> compilation of these externals only has to be done only once. But as
> everyone knows that I don't really understand why a DB external has to
> be a C/C++ external, I'll better be quiet now. ;) 

Actually, please don't be quiet! When this was discussed some time ago,
you mentioned Python as a solution, and my feeling was that if I write a
piece and it uses some database connectivity, I don't really want to
have to distribute a Python runtime, relevant Python SQL module, [py]
and all the respective dependencies with it. I just (at most) want to
include an external, and the databse library it uses. If I write a
piece, I can't reasonably expect a performer to resolve all of this
themselves - it needs to "just work". I also want to minimise as much as
possible the number of discrete components in the system that could
possibly go wrong.

However, Lua seems a slightly different story, ([lua] doesn't require
flext, and Lua is very lean) - I'm starting to be convinced by it. It
might be interesting to recreate [psql] using lua and luasql, and see
how it measures up in terms of portability, ease of distribution and
performance. I just downloaded [lua], and luasql, and It certainly
didn't take long to get these things working on a basic level.

Jamie

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