[Info-vax] Restful API w/JSON client package or library on OpenVMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 3/21/2024 9:08 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-03-20, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> Well, not sure how much you want to get into things.  But, if you're going to
>> implement something, why put some PC in the middle of things.  It's rather
>> simple to do from VMS.
>>
>> At the bottom of whatever is used is, wait for it, a socket.  Simple socket
>> communications.  Add SSL/TLS for encryption.
>>
>> I'm not looking at your requirements, but, I'd bet that HTTPS is used.  After
>> that, it's just what happens to the data.
>>
>> Isn't data manipulation what we do?
> 
> Why is everyone focused on the HTTP part of the problem only ?
> 
> You also need a decent JSON library that allows you to turn the incoming
> JSON into a data structure that you can make queries to and iterate over
> its components as required.

Web service client and server consist of 4 problems.

One hard:
* HTTP server

Two medium:
* HTTP client
* reading JSON

One trivial:
* writing JSON

Most newer languages comes with HTTP and JSON support,
but the traditional VMS languages does not.

There are C libraries for reading JSON and
some of them build on VMS.

My preferred one is cJSON.

And I have VMS Pascal wrappers (I am calling it PJSON).

Writing wrappers in VMS Basic would not be that difficult.

Fortran and Cobol would probably be ugly - variable length
strings makes code simpler.

Arne