#5 Best approach for interfacing CQP with other software

[ram]

Hi, I want to know which could be the best approach for using CQP as backend. I have look the section 7 of the CQP Manual, the CQi Tutorial, the CQi Specification, the man of cqpserver and the code of cqpserver.c, and I still find this implementation confusing.

The intention is to have a Django platform to replace CQPweb. In the test that I have made, I managed to connect to cqpserver via socket, but when I attempt to initiate a connection with CQI_CTRL_CONNECT the connection hangs with the message “Connected. Waiting for CONNECT request.” I tried to send the user and the password after CQI_CTRL_CONNECT but I get the same result.

The tests was like this:

import socket

HOST = '0.0.0.0'
PORT = 4877

with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as s:
    s.connect((HOST, PORT))
    s.sendall(bytes.fromhex("1101"))
    s.sendall(b'user')
    s.sendall(b'password')
    data = s.recv(1024)

Finally, reviewing this platform, I found that in https://sourceforge.net/p/cwb/support-requests/2/ Stephanie Evert commented that “CQi has fallen back behind CWB development over the last years.”

With this information, what would be the best approach to accomplish this?

Thanks

[Stephanie Evert]

Since you're working in Python, you should use the native API provided by cwb-ccc package. It is well-maintained and up to date, but doesn't support Windows platforms yet (help wanted!).

[ram]

Thanks, I just tried and it works like a charm. Now, just for my acknowledge, what is the status of CQi?

Thanks again, we don't use windows, but little by little we are going to find a way to help with the project since our Django is gonna depend on that :)

[Stephanie Evert]

We don't currently have plans to continue the development of CQi, though cqpserver and the Perl client are still fully functional. CQi doesn't wrap all relevant CQP functionality yet and has a few suboptimal design choices, and currently there doesn't seem to be much demand for a client-server API of this type. Direct APIs such as the ones available for Python, Perl and R are more efficient and convenient to use.

As a point of interest, the R API (RCppCWB) is modeled after CQi, but accesses the internal C functions directly.

[ram]

Thanks, @schtepf, this information has been very helpful. I have more questions, but I will open a new ticket for that.