Status Report for Ocamlnet
==========================

Date: 9/22/2001

General Status:

  A proposal for new CGI modules has been made. The signatures of
  these modules are available for review at:

    http://www.ocaml-programming.de/web-caml/netstring

  Send comments or questions to the ocamlnet-devel mailing list.

Completed Tasks:

  - CGI modules: Presented a proposal for new CGI modules to
    include in netstring.  The functionality of the old CGI module has
    been split into several components to make it easier to maintain
    and extend.
    
    One entirely new feature is support for transactional output channels.
    This means you can roll back any already produced output when an error
    or abnormal condition arises, and you can replace the output by a more
    adequate web page (Gerd).

  - Object-based channel support: A new module Netchannels includes object
    based channels as well as transactional channels (Gerd).

  - PCRE Integration: A new API function needed by Netstring has been
    added to PCRE version 4.8-1.  It corresponds to the 'e' option of
    the Perl search/replace operator, which allows for arbitrary
    manipulation of the substrings as replacement text.  The new
    version is available for download at:

      http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~markus/ocaml_sources/pcre_ocaml-4.8-1.tar.gz

Assigned Tasks:

  - CGI modules: Finalize interface and begin the implementation and
    testing effort (Gerd).

  - PCRE Integration: Write configure script to determine location of
    PCRE library and checkin modifications to netstring library (Patrick).

  - Date/Time functions: Implement regression tests, and integrate with the
    netstring library (Patrick).

Unassigned Tasks:

  - MIME messages: New module to analyze and construct MIME
    messages. Initial version will include parsing support only.

  - PCRE/Str compatibility: Explore a PCRE compatibility layer for the
    Str module based on the efforts to port netstring to use PCRE.
    Gerd has suggested using the Javacaml regular expression parser as
    a starting point for translating Str-based regular expressions to
    Pcre-based regular expressions.

  - Determine a policy regarding backwards compatibility.  How are
    functions deprecated and changes made over time? This will likely
    be connected with configuration management conventions that should
    also be defined.