Thursday, June 23, 2016

Let the lions out.

Finally! Circus has its core feature implemented: password generation.

The password generator is almost identical to pwd's: number of characters, and four classes of characters: letters, figures, symbols, and free-form (pwd only had the first three forms). The free-form allows to specify the exact set of characters to choose from.

Also in the news:

  • Templates now have "operators". Only one operator is implemented for the moment: count, which gives either the length of a string or the number of elements in an array.
  • An important update in libcad's packaging fixes a long-standing error: the -dbg package did not correctly provide the library's symbols. This fix will enable an accurate check of the memory leaks of Circus, and to fix them.

Hold your red nose, and make the whip crack: the lions roar!

Thursday, June 16, 2016

The circus is back to town.

That's right: the last circus article was posted almost four months ago. Real life took its toll.

So what happened in the scant time I could spare?

The CGI client is now awake and kicking.
It is especially security-conscious: secure cookies, nonce tokens, cache control… The only missing technology is Post/Redirect/Get; I keep that for later as it needs important changes (esp. more roundtrips with the server).
The CGI client uses a code generator that translates a JSON file to web actions. It greatly simplifies adding new pages!

A new manual test script was added. It starts the server and a local web server (lighttpd).

The administration pages are complete (or complete enough for an alpha release).

The user pages are work in progress. They are the core of the system, and I want that part done right! Especially the password generator. It will use a similar algorithm to pwd's, but maybe mix ideas from e.g. pwgen.

There is still a lot of work to do; the clowns still need to apply makeup instead of fooling around. But hearts stay light under the marquee!