Re: Gathering data on user preferences

[Tim Cross]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>
>>> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> tomas@tuxteam.de writes:
>>>>
>>>>> As a small nit: why JSON and not S-expressions? We're lispies, after
>>>>> all ;-)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Only because from a web perspective, middleware to process body contents
>>>> consisting of JSON are plentiful, while libraries for s-expressions are
>>>> not.  
>>>
>>> But you would be processing them in Emacs which is very good at processing 
>>> both
>>> text and s-expressions? :)
>>
>> Why would you be processing them in Emacs? If you had a web service, the
>> last thing you would have is Emacs sitting behind the web server. You
>> would use something better suited which would process the data from the
>> POST request which then stores the data in some format. You might have
>> Emacs be able to query that data to get reports. 
>
> Just save a byte stream, and then process in Emacs?

But why? There are loads of libraries which can do all the necessary
processing and storage of results that would be almost trivial to
assemble and the data would be processed as soon as it arrives - all
done without need for human intervention. Putting emacs into the mix
would only complicate the processes and make it a more manual process. A
boring task best left to machines I think. All we are really interested
in is the aggregate data, not each submission.