Vivtek free stuff

Since Vivtek is primarily a service company, we don't have a lot of problems giving you some stuff that we find useful but we don't want to mess with in terms of service. And we've got some little tools online that you might find useful, too.

LITERATE PROGRAMMING

Exactly one free tool. Please download it and tell me you like it.

Prototype XML-based literate progamming system
If you don't know what literate programming is, read the introductory topic. The LPML project is working towards an XML-based, Perl-native literate programming system, and its prototype, lpml alpha is already online and working. If you're interested in better programming documentation you might want to give it a try. It's got a long way to go but it's already interesting.

XML

For XML, I have the XML command-line utilities that I call "xmltools."

XMLtools
XMLtools are four command-line utilties for mangling up XML: xmlsnip, xmlset, xmlinsert, xmlreplace. They all do things to little bits of the XML tree. They're based on James Clark's expat, so they run beautifully under either Unix or Win32 (under Windows the expat parser is a DLL, nice feature!) Anyway, I've got executables for Solaris if you want'em, but the make is really simple.

WORKFLOW

Open-source workflow toolkit
Vivtek's first real foray into open-source programming, the wftk is a big, sprawling project that will never be finished. But one component is!

Task list manager
The task list manager is an AOLserver/Tcl-based, um, task list manager, which really could use a sexier name. Ah well. It's still in prototype, but you're welcome to give it a whirl if you're running AOLserver. And if you're not, well, you should! Go read up on it! More components will be following soon. I'm on a roll.

ONLINE UTILITIES

My online utilities (well, OK, only one is there for public consumption right now) are mostly products of my anti-spam sleuthing. Yeah, I could use Sam Spade, but I like writing my own stuff. If you're into making fun of spammers and scammers, I suggest you drop by the Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation, where I spend entirely too much time.

The dumb proxy
The dumb proxy uses our HTTP client. It's useful for grabbing stuff without all that browser overhead, seeing headers that the server sends back, JavaScript before it gets executed, and so on. It's cool.

AOLSERVER EXTENSIONS

We do a lot of work with AOLserver. Don't laugh, it's a great product and it's free; you can go look at our AOLserver topic if you want to know more. Unfortunately, the future doesn't look really good for AOLserver regardless of its manifest superiority, thanks to Microsoft's IIS dumping practices in large part, but also due to the incredible popularity of Apache. Anyway, we have a couple of Tcl code files that you're free to use if you are running AOLserver.

HTTP client
This gives you the ability to write Tcl code which hits other servers. You can use this to write spiders, preprocessors, database siphons, heck, all kinds of stuff. Just imagine anything you would like your browser to do automatically, and do it. We are using this in a couple of different places, and so it's getting pretty stable.
CyberCash integration
This encapsulates the good parts of CyberCash's MCK functionality. We use it in our ecomm solution, so it is really proving out. It uses the HTTP client above, so you'll need to get both. We have plans to extend it to cover CyberCash's administrative functionality, too, but in the meantime it's still a good way to integrate AOLserver with CyberCash without a lot of Perl overhead. And it's informative, too; the code is a better read than their Perl. So there!
You'll still need the MCK, for the licensing and for the encryption functionality, but you won't need to install most of it.