The visual tools group will have its 26th meeting on June 16th.
In this meeting, Gary Johnson and @Daniel_Szmulewicz will give two talks regarding the use of internet protocols from Clojure.
For the background that has motivated the meetings, see the recent discussion at the Clojure mailing group.
Agenda
(see the detailed abstracts below)
- Gary Johnson - Space-Age and the Gemini Protocol (Clojure on the Small Web)
- Daniel Szmulewicz - How not to be protocolary with protocols
- Discussion
Joining
Please write to @daslu or comment below if you wish to participate. You can also use the Add to Calendar to add the event to your calendar.
Length
The official part will be 90 minutes long.
Sometimes, some of us like to stay longer and chat.
Video Call
Zoom link: Launch Meeting - Zoom
Recording
Possibly, we will share a recording of parts of the meeting. This has not been decided yet.
Talk abstracts
Space-Age and the Gemini Protocol (Clojure on the Small Web) - Gary Johnson
Gemini is a text-centric, persistent communication protocol based
around a hyperlinked web of documents that is now almost 5 years old.
In many ways, it feels like the early web, but at the same time, it
provides privacy and authentication through the use of TLS encryption
and client-side X.509 certificates.
The protocol itself is an exercise in elegant minimalism and can be
easily understood and implemented by a single developer with a few
days of effort. All requests are encrypted. Request and response
headers are extremely minimal, and there are no cookies. Every request
serves a single document with no cascaded downloads, and there is no
client-side programming language like Javascript. Taken together,
these features ensure a private, safe, and user-driven browsing
experience without the need for ad blockers, browser extensions, or
similar defensive measures.
While the feature set may seem minimal, Gemini’s community has been
extremely creative in the content that they have produced over the
years. In particular, server-side CGI scripting is well supported.
Because Clojure programmers also deserve a great experience in writing
Gemini pages and applications, I developed the Space-Age Gemini server
in Clojure in the summer and fall of 2020. While having zero
dependencies beyond Clojure itself, Space-Age supports a unique
Ring-like programming model that enables easy server-side scripting in
our favorite programming language.
In this talk, I will demonstrate Space-Age’s features and show off
some of my favorite Gemini applications.
Useful Links:
How not to be protocolary with protocols - Daniel Szmulewicz
I would like to talk about how Internet protocols can be fun to play with, especially at the REPL. Simple protocols like Intetd or SOCKS present a good learning experience for socket programming. Even HTTP, the opposite of a simple protocol, can be tamed given enough irreverence. I will talk about the blog post “The Anatomy Of a HTTP Server” and how the exercise led to an actual insight regarding web frameworks.