[Caml-list] [ANNOUNCE] Development versions: ocamlconf, ASPCC

[Kenneth Knowles <kknowles@uclink.berkeley.edu>]

Hello caml-list,

I have two projects that I haven't polished to a release state, but I'm hoping
someone might be interested in, so I'm offering access via darcs
(http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs)

(1) ocamlconf
Ocamlconf is like autoconf but much simpler, utterly ocaml-centric, and
dependent on findlib.

You can get it via the command
	'darcs get http://kefka.frap.net:8080/~kenn/repos/ocamlconf'

What it is/does:
*	An autoconf-like tool but using ocaml scripts instead of m4
*	It uses the ocaml toplevel instead of bytecode for cross-version
	compatability
*	Outputs a makefile and a simple config.ml
*	It is _extremely_ simple to use, especially if your projects are 100% ocaml,
	like mine.  (A configure.ml comparable to a configure.ac might be 100
	lines for a complex project)

Why I didn't use autotools/ocamlmakefile/...:
*	autotools are pretty C centric, and more of a pain than necessary for
	an ocaml project which already limits its audience to more-or-less modern
	users.  GNU must support very arcane and archaic setups, but ocamlconf aims
	to suport "anything with ocaml"
*	anyone building an ocaml package with have the toplevel already
*	OcamlMakefile is awkward with multiple targets (such as suites of utilities)
	and I'd rather write (or depend on) a simple ocaml script than a complex 
	Makefile
*	And of course, I did it to see if I could make something simple and useful
	for myself - I've succeeded, as it is what I use for 100% of my ocaml
	projects

(2) ASPCC 
ASPCC started as a little project to robustly parse VbScript, for practice.
Then with the abstract syntax tree I tried to output equivalent PHP scripts.  I
got pretty far on that, and decided I needed to run the VbScript in order to do
unit-test comparisons between it and the PHP.  Here is what it is now:

You can get it via the command
	'darcs get http://kefka.frap.net:8080/~kenn/repos/aspcc'

*	A naively simple ASP interpreter that still appears to be more than 
	competitive in speed with MS ASP, but needs more DB support to run
	real-world apps.  It does, however, support all VbScript syntax.

*	Support for running .asp files under Apache.  No mod_caml support yet, but
	it runs as a CGI and is not at a point

*	An incomplete bytecode compiler and VM.  I made up a new bytecode instead of
	using ocaml or Java because VbScript has really really weird semantics 
	sometimes.  Also I want to try my hand at a little virtual machine for fun.

Again, the disclaimers:  I hate VbScript, but I program it because my company
has a huge ASP codebase, and I love the people here; they are just a little
change-wary.  There are other VbScript / ASP solutions, but all of them are
incomplete in different ways, have different focuses, and are written in
languages that I'm not really interested in using.

Thanks for reading if you made it through all that,

Kenn

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