On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 09:21:23AM -0700, David N. Welton wrote: > And I would like an HTTP tester library. I think that if done in this > way, it would be versatile enough to replace ab, and it would also > give people the freedom to experiment with other front ends. Like > someting in Tk, gtk, or whatever...
Ah, but that is precisely why we use XML input to control the behaviour of flood, so that someone can come along and write whatever fancy GUI app they wish and couple it only to our XMl schema. There is another reason why we chose XML that gives us greater flexibility than a library interface could ever give -- platform transparency. Since flood processes need not all run on the same machine, it is not a requirement that all machines where flood are running be of the same operating system or architecture. This also means that the GUI need not be on the same machine where the actual flood process is invoked. Try doing that with a library. One thing that might be useful would be if something like tcl were embedded in flood. In that case it might make sense for flood to export its high-level functions for use in an embedded scripting language. This would give us much greater power over test cases than would be possible in XML (it would be possible, but not trivially so.) Just some food for thought. -aaron
