Re: Greetings and comments on MCP 2.1

[Michael Brundage <brundage@piaf.ipac.caltech.edu>]

On 7 Aug 1997, John D. Ramsdell wrote:
> I strongly support this proposal to eliminating _data-tag: and find
> this proposal superior to the alternative I proposed while back.

Cool!

> I'm in the process of writing an MCP parser in Java with support for
> multiline MCP messages.  The algorithm this proposal requires is
> straight forward, in particular, using a separate data tag for each
> multiline in one MCP message value greatly simplifies the parser.  I
> take this as good evidence of the value of this proposal.

Yes, and this is a part of why I suggested it.  In fact, we 
already have such a Java parser (although it uses '=' instead of ':', 
that's a simple change in a single place) which converts between strings 
and OOB data (which are just the message name plus a hashtable of 
key/value pairs) in either direction.  I'm not sure how releasing our code 
works yet; I think Caltech owns everything I write, but since this is 
all paid for by NASA maybe they own it.  (But then, Caltech runs JPL for 
NASA, so maybe it's all the same anyway.)

In any case, Dave and I were already talking about releasing both the MOO 
code and the Java code for parsing MCP data, once the spec is 
finalized.  If this is of interest to you, let me know and I'll see what 
I can do to make it available.  (Although it's not that big a deal to 
write, so maybe you just want to do it yourself for enjoyment's sake.)

:-)

michael