Re: [Chicken-users] memcached

[Graham Fawcett]

On 6/19/07, Alaric Snell-Pym <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> I'm just assembling an egg to act a a memcached client.

Cool, that would be nice to have.

> 2) Write a second egg containing a Scheme-friendly API for caches.
> This will involve a simple abstraction for caches, with 'null' (never
> remembers anything), 'in-memory' (just uses a hash table in RAM) and
> 'namespace' (uses a parent cache, but inserts a prefix onto keys in
> order to isolate from other uses of the same cache) implementations.
> Keys and values can now be arbitrary s-expressions (although
> memcached keys cannot contain spaces, so I'm going to need to work
> out some encoding).

Since Chicken continuations are serializable, you could also store
them as values in the cache. Not sure of a use-case, but there you
are.

> But I'd like some feedback...
>
> I could incorporate both eggs into one, but then apps that want to
> use the in-memory cache would get a memcached implementation, too.
> Said implementation wouldn't be very big, but still, it's not good to
> bloat things. I'm open to the decision of the community on this one.
> One egg that contains the generic cache API with all the backends,
> and a separate API for low-level access to memcached? Or two separate
> eggs?

Personally, I'd only be interested in the memcached egg. If you're
implementing the memcached protocol (i.e. not depending upon a
libmemcache library) then having one common egg doesn't seem bad to
me. If there is a library dependency, then I'd vote for separating out
the library-dependent ones into a separate egg. (Note, there's a rule
(unwritten?) about providing only one extension module per egg.)

> Either way, I'd like a subversion repository login, please. Whether
> or not I have an egg called 'memcached' as well, I'll certainly make
> an egg which I propose to innovatively called 'cache'.

Hm, maybe something a bit less generic? "Cubby", "pigeonhole", and
"haberdashery" are all available...

> My favourite username is 'alaric', and my favourite colour is dark blue.

(Dark blue?! Great, another one of those.) Good luck with the egg, Alaric.

Graham

PS: I visited your blog; I was also the Akela of a Cub pack for many
happy years. Dyb-dyb-dyb on that egg! :-)