roxen.lists.pike.general

Subject Author Date
Suggestions for a small menu-driven system? Stephen R. van den Berg <srb[at]cuci[dot]nl> 19-08-2009
Picture this:

A small appliance (running an AMD Geode x86 processor with 256MB RAM, and
1GB compact flash, no harddisk), which I use to create a custom
firewall/application proxy (for voip and such).

This device needs a GUI which is:
- Web based.
- Easy to maintain and extend.

In order to realise this, I was considering:
- lighttpd as the webserver doing CGI.
- rrdtool for statistics and graphs.
- Pike 7.8 as the primary CGI-script engine.
- sqlite3 to actually store the configuration of the device.

The most obvious way to actually implement the menu system would probably
to invent some kind of XML like syntax which is parsed in Pike which
then fetches and stores in the sqlite3 database.

The XML like syntax could be rather simple, or could be some kind of
minimal RXML like syntax which supports define/emit/if/else.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to attack this problem, perhaps in a way
others can benefit from, or maybe someone already has dealt with something
like this and can offer code and/or advice?

P.S. in case anyone is interested, I'm using an Alix 2d3, 3 ethernet ports,
     and have tweaked a standard Debian testing installation so that it
     can be upgraded/administered using standard Debian tools, yet it
     uses a 3 partition system on the 1GB flash (rescue partition,
     configuration partition, normal system partition).  In a sense like
     Voyage, except with well separated rescue and configuration partitions.
-- 
Sincerely,
           Stephen R. van den Berg.
Currently unemployed programmer:
"What do you mean, I can't initialize things in an assert()?"