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Mail-based services

Back in Bristol for family things, I've a little time to spend on services to allow me to keep in touch from the boat via the SSB, Pactor-2 and Sailmail.

I now have some useful services which are invoked by sending an email to an SMTP to POST server (thanks again to Patrick Quinn-Graham) converted to an HTTP Post call on a server-side service (all in XQuery running on a UWE server) which, where a reply is needed, generates a return email.

  • Sailing Blog: updating a sailing micro-blog
  • Twitter:
    • sending a Tweet
    • requesting a search
  • SMS: sending an SMS message
  • Weather: requesting weather data:
    • WeatherOnline 4 day forecast by code or lat/long
    • METAR airport weather report
    • UK shipping forecast
    • NOAA buoy data 

I'd like to make these services available to other cruisers but I'm wary of abusing the usage I have of the UWE server.  A major task for autumn will be to set up eXist on another server.

There is little to the code in any of these applications. It's all parsing, requesting and formating.  XQuery is good for all these tasks, but I'm rather tired of hack parsing with string functions.  I wonder if there is a lex-yacc library for XQuery?  If not we need one.