I'm pleased to announce the release of the first version of Myscsh.
Myscsh is an implementation of the MySQL client/server protocol written
entirely in Scheme. This package provides functions to connect to a
MySQL database server, authenticate, send queries, and receive and parse
result sets. The API is quite low-level: it's just about reading and
parsing messages and sending messages. Thus, using the low-level API of
Myscsh requires a bit of knowledge of the MySQL client/server protocol.
Future versions of Myscsh will include a higher-level API for convenient
database programming. Myscsh implements the MySQL 4.1 protocol (which
has the internal protocol version number 10) and has been tested in
conjunction with a MySQL 4.1 server on Linux. It might work with a 5.x
server as well, but that's completely untested. It won't work with 3.20
servers, that's for sure.
* Download
The latest version is available at
<http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/knauel/myscsh/>
* Why an implementation of the protocol?
An alternative approach for connecting to MySQL is to use the C library
libmysqlclient.so. A lot of language implementations provide bindings
to this library. Hence, this is a well-tested approach. However, here
are some reasons for implementing the protocol in Scheme:
o No C code to compile, no header files to search for, no shared
libraries to search for, and no dynamic modules to load. Less
high-tech, less trouble.
o In scsh and Scheme 48, calling C functions from Scheme blocks the
whole Scheme system until the C function returns. Hence,
sending a complex query to MySQL using the corresponding C
function will stop all Scheme threads until the SQL result is
available. This is not acceptable, especially since the SQL
queries may take seconds to compute. There is no easy way to fix
this.
o The Scheme code is quite portable and could be used by other
Scheme implementations. The code only uses very few Scheme 48
or scsh specific features, i. e. for network connections.
o Writing C bindings is boring. I have written too much C
bindings in the past years.
Implementing the protocol is not a particular original idea: For
example, there is a Ruby implementation of the 3.20 protocol.
* Source code repository
The latest version of the source code resides in a darcs repository at
the following address:
<http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/knauel/sw/myscsh/>
* Known bugs, limitations
Some things that may cause trouble:
o The code completely ignores character encoding issues. It just
assumes that the character encoding the Scheme system is using
is the right one for communicating with the server. This works
in many cases, but is a bad idea in principal.
Some things that have not been implemented or tested yet:
o receiving result sets that contain binary values
o prepared statements, parameter messages, and long data packets
o compression
* Future work
o Write some documentation
o Add a high-level API for convenient database programming
o Better error-handling using SRFI 34 and SRFI 35
* Bug reports, questions, patches, and author's address:
Please send bug reports, questions, patches directly to the author of
Myscsh:
Eric Knauel
knauel@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
|