[mw-devel] Marvin

[Justin Mitchell]

Marvin Project progress report

Well, seeing as there seems to be a little renewed interest 
in the Marvin project i thought i should make some comments
on the subject.

Current State:
A simple client exists which packages up any typed message
and sends it to the server using the XML format, and prints
any replies it gets.

And likewise a simplistic server which will handle multiple
connections and processes a couple of very simple commands.

Way forward:
I think the best way to progress the system is to get a slightly
more function shell working as soon as possible, and then let 
the system evolve more once people can use it.

To achieve this i think we need to get just two features working,
1) Get a database backend hooked up to the server, 
   istr we already have an appropriate one written in the mw3 codebase
   that we never got around to migrating too.
2) To hook up the slang scripting engine to the db and network access 
   functions.  

I have been looking at this and the slang library is incredibly simple
to use (i have an example i knocked up in minutes) and is very C like.

It is quite simple to make variables, arrays, structures, and functions
appear within the slang engine for its scripts to use, so i would
propose adding a few new functions to slang for interacting with the
database backend, and also to send & recv message objects.

Once we have that done, we can write the majority of the rest of 
marvins core features in the scripting language !
Which to me sounds like a good way to encourage contribution 
from others, as the existing mw-scripting language did.

A subset of those extenstions can then also be used to add
scripting support to the client as well at a later date.