I just checked in a small update to moriarty that might solve a problem some people have experienced using curl. It appears that even though curl implemented support for HTTP digest way back in 2003 with version 7.10.6, it took several more releases to iron out the bugs. The version I develop with 7.18.0 (and the version installed on Talis application servers) works without issue, but many webhosts have much older versions. In fact my own webhost is still on 7.10.6 which means that digest authentication doesn’t work as expected. To date there has been no workaround. The latest change to Moriarty adds support for using httpclient written by Manuel Lemos. This is a complete HTTP client written in PHP. To use digest authentication you also need sasl which is also written by Manuel Lemos. Moriarty looks for those two classes and uses them if it finds them otherwise it falls back to using curl as before.

To use httpclient with Moriarty you just need to ensure that http_class and sasl_interact_class are loaded before using any HTTP actions. Adding lines like the following to your index.php (or somewhere similar) should do the trick:

    require_once '/path/to/moriarty/lib/httpclient/http.php';

    require_once '/path/to/moriarty/lib/sasl/sasl.php';

About Moriarty… Moriarty is a simple PHP library for accessing the Talis Platform. It follows the Platform API very closely and wraps up many common tasks into convenient classes while remaining very lightweight. It also provides some simple RDF classes that are based on the excellent ARC2 class library. Moriarty is primarily being developed by Ian Davis and is in continual alpha, subject to occasional rapid bursts of change. You can read more about Moriarty on the n² wiki or visit its Google Code project

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Another day, another incremental improvement to Moriarty (svn revision 490)! After my last set of changes I thought I’d better hurry up and add the copy_to function to the FieldPredicateMap too. You can now clone Field/Predicate Maps from one store to another:

  $fp = new FieldPredicateMap("http://api.talis.com/stores/mystore/config/fpmaps/1");
  $response = $fp->get_from_network();
  if ( $response->is_success() ) {
    $new_fp = $fp->copy_to("http://api.talis.com/stores/otherstore/config/fpmaps/1");
    $new_fp->put_to_network();
  }

I then set about thinking through my plan for adding HTTP caching support to Moriarty. I want this to work automatically and transparently, taking advantage of conditional GETs on the Platform. I’ll let it be switched off by defining a constant but I want it to be there by default so the developer gets the benefit without any effort.

I stubbed out some initial ideas for the HttpCache class on the train this morning. Then at lunchtime today, Danny pinged me on IRC wondering why Moriarty didn’t have SPARQL ASK support. “Not by design”, I said, “more by lack of time. But it should be easy to add, give me 15 minutes”. Then I promptly went into a series of meetings that ate the rest of my day. In the end the code did only take 15 minutes, but I finished it 11 hours later than I expected. Hopefully Danny didn’t spend all that time waiting for me to respond on IRC

You can perform an ASK query on a store like this:

  $store = new Store("http://api.talis.com/stores/mystore");
  $sparql = $store->get_sparql_service();
  $response = $sparql->ask( "ASK WHERE {?s a .}" );
  if ($response->is_success()) {
    $result = $sparql->parse_ask_results( $response->body);
  }

Enjoy, Danny!

About Moriarty… Moriarty is a simple PHP library for accessing the Talis Platform. It follows the Platform API very closely and wraps ups many common tasks into convenient classes while remaining very lightweight. It also provides some simple RDF classes that are based on the excellent ARC2 class library. Moriarty is primarily being developed by Ian Davis and is in continual alpha, subject to occasional rapid bursts of change. You can read more about Moriarty on the n² wiki and get its source from the n² subversion repository

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