From: Carl Youngblood <carl.youngblood@...>
Date: 2004-07-16T03:56:36+09:00
Subject: Re: scripting language (fwd)

Isn't there source code for the oci oracle protocol out there?  A lot
of open source projects have that option.  I'm thinking of PHP.  You
might want to look at the source before you try reverse-engineering
anything.

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 03:34:17 +0900, Jamis Buck <jgb3@email.byu.edu> wrote:
> Ara.T.Howard wrote:
> >
> > got this from a friend... any thoughts?
> >
> > -a
> > --
> > ===============================================================================
> >
> > | EMAIL   :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
> > | PHONE   :: 303.497.6469
> > | A flower falls, even though we love it;
> > | and a weed grows, even though we do not love it. |   --Dogen
> > ===============================================================================
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:33:35 -0700 (PDT)
> > To: Ara.T.Howard <Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov>
> > Subject: scripting language
> >
> > Hey A-
> >
> > I'm investigating alternative scripting languages.  We
> > currently use Perl almost exclusively (except
> > sometimes some ksh) but would like to consider a
> > language that is friendlier with the JVM.  It also has
> > to have an LDAP API and an Oracle API, without
> > requiring C coding (we don't have C coders here).
> >
> > My first task is to write a trivial script that
> > selects one row from an Oracle database.  I installed
> > ruby for windows.  I downloaded & installed ruby DBD,
> > which says it requires ruby OCI, which doesn't come in
> > binary form (i.e. requires me to compile it with a c
> > compiler, which I don't have on my windows box).
> >
> > That's probably more rigamarole than several of these
> > other languages require.  And the libraries themselves
> > seem to be mostly alpha software with the last update
> > sometime in 2003.
> >
> > I'm struck by the elegance of ruby and I'd really like
> > to try and make it work, but am having a hard time
> > fitting it into the production realities of our shop.
> > I'm getting the impression that a C shop could really
> > take the language and run with it, but a
> > cobol/SQL/java shop like ours may be out of luck.  Do
> > you have any encouraging words/links before I move on?
> 
> Has anyone ever reverse-engineered a network protocol before? It would
> certainly be nice to have a "pure-ruby" driver for Oracle, so that it
> could be used right out of the box on any platform, like the thin JDBC
> drivers for Oracle.
> 
> I took a glance at some of the packets exchanged with our Oracle db here
> and it looks like it might not be too difficult to come up with... but
> then again, I'm probably hopelessly naive on this score, having never
> even attempted to reverse engineer a protocol before. In fact, I don't
> even know what the legal issues surrounding this would be.
> 
> I just think it would be slick. :)
> 
> --
> Jamis Buck
> jgb3@email.byu.edu
> http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis
> 
> "I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."
> 
>