Re: [Koha-devel] Re: A Win32 circulation client (beginning stages)

[Ambrose Li]

Hi,

[It seems that you are not cc'ing to the list.]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 08:37:33PM +1300, Patrick Quinn-Graham
wrote:

> I've started to look at the circulation.pl script (certainly
> not the nicest of the perl scripts I've seen in my
> life time. Can some one tell me why it has to be _one_
> script? Couldn't there be a borrower_prompt.pl issueing.pl
> issuebook.pl that would be way easier to read...) - and lots
> of things are pushed through to C4::Circulation::Circ2, so
> it could feasibly have a wrapper put around the necessary
> functions. Perhaps a WebService? I'm sure you can do those in
> Perl. I can't say I like sending things like that over the
> HTTP, even if it was going over https.  Perhaps I just don't
> like programming in that model (open connection, make request,
> close connection).

yes, Koha's perl code is not very pretty.

In 1.3.x Koha is being "templatized" (I mean separating the
presentation from the code using HTML templates), and this is
not finished yet; and unfortunately circulation.pl is one of
those that has not yet gone through "templatization", so it is
messier than most other scripts.  There are quite a few other
important scripts that are still "untemplatized" and thus can't
be localized into another language.

(Of course by this I don't mean Perl can't do localization
any other way, just that the Koha developers had decided on a
certain way to localize Koha.)

> I'm not really familiar with getting perl to do something over
> a network other than through a webbrowser, so I don't know how
> much I could help in that regard.

If you don't mind working within the existing framework for
the moment, then you don't have to worry about knowing how to
send things over the network. A CGI-type script doesn't have
to directly send things to the network; it only communicates
with the web server using an API that involves only sending
and receiving through standard input, standard output, and the
environment (the CGI "protocol"). With perl you don't even need
to worry about the input and the environment. Same thing with
communicating with the SQL server; all is done through API's
provided by classes.

> A shame about the telnet-type-client being broken...
>
> But then, a lot seems to be broken (using the web-based demo
> is kind of tragic, my local copy still gives JavaScript errors
> in the catalogue editing section).

Could you file a bug report in bugs.koha.org about these
JavaScript errors?

> My biggest issue right now: authenticating users... how does
> Koha do it?  I can't quite seem to figure it out just by
> looking at the code.

I believe the logic is mostly in the C4::Auth module; of course
the scripts need to be written a certain way in order for
authentication to work. I believe the user names and passwords
are in a MySQL table, and at the "browser" level the user sees
it as a cookie-based authentication.



-- 
Ambrose Li  <address@hidden>