[ale] Programming and preferred languages?

[Byron Jeff]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2017 at 09:20:43AM -0500, Chris Fowler wrote:
>    I love SQLite. Use thay sh at t everywhere. My JSON has expanded too. I
>    use it now for package data and am moving configs from an INI format to
>    JSON.
>    IoT likes JSON so using it there I grew to like it over my old standby
>    of XML. Going between JSON and hashes in Perl is a breeze. I also
>    started using it as program output when the java developers call one of
>    my programs. Easier for them than parsing strings on STDOUT. Instead, I
>    print the JSON on STDOUT.
> 

Chris,

I too took a tour of config file formats specifically for an IoT project.
Specifically connecting Google Home to home built RasPi Zero endpoints
using MQTT as the data transport. I just added 433Mhz remote outlets to the
mix too. Upshot is that the endpoints need to be configured to know which
MQTT topics to monitor for updates.

The two I took a look at are YAML (http://yaml.org) and TOML
(https://github.com/toml-lang/toml). Both have a design goal in mind to be
human readable/writable while also being machine parsable. While JSON is
great for machine to machine transactions, the others are better when you
need to hand write a config in a text file. For me TOML looks like the
winner.

BAJ

-- 
Byron A. Jeff
Associate Professor: Department of Computer Science and Information Technology
College of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Clayton State University
http://faculty.clayton.edu/bjeff