BBC Basic Question

Hi,
as I’ve got my RPi running RISC OS, I’m seeing this as an opportunity to return to a bit of tinkering. My question is about accessing the internet using BASIC – specifically sending POST or GET data to a server and receiving data back.

I’ve been trying to find some way of doing this, but I can’t find anything. we know that data can be sent to and fro because of browsers, FTP apps etc.. Is there a module that needs to be loaded so I can use * commands or SWI calls?

My question is about accessing the internet using BASIC – specifically sending POST or GET data to a server and receiving data back.

I’ve been trying to find some way of doing this, but I can’t find anything. we know that data can be sent to and fro because of browsers, FTP apps etc.. Is there a module that needs to be loaded so I can use * commands or SWI calls?

You might want to study the runimage of http://www.apts04.dsl.pipex.com/Progs/Antispam.htm
and the uncompressed source basic of the more complex and newer version developed from the above:
http://antispam.aconet.org/

Off to the London place shortly (Kensington Olympia, building a beer festival not that sporting stuff)

Programmers Reference Manual volume 5a covers internet stuff. The tutorial section is written from the point of view of developing in C, but everything is translatable into BASIC. In particular each library call has a corresponding SWI in the Socket module.

See http://foundation.riscos.com/Private/manuals/PRMs/PRM5a.pdf

You will also probably need to use the Resolver module. I guess that is also covered in PRM 5a, but the section on the Resolver is also available at http://select.riscos.com/prm/networking/resolver.html

There are modules, available for download from ROOL, which can talk HTTP and return the data (specifically AcornHTTP and URL).

As an example of them, have a look at the Artistic-licenced TVGuide which uses BASIC (albeit in WimpWorks) to download data over HTTP from bleb.org.

Hi, all
Lots of useful stuff here. I’d found references in the PRM today already before I checked back here. I’ll certainly try some of these modules out and see what I I can get out of them.

Hmm – unfortunately, not much to go on. The TVGuide application appears to be compiled machine code, so no chance of picking that apart.

I can’t find any documentation for the AcornHTTP module. There appear to be some commands available when I load the module into Edit, but when it’s RMLoaded and running, those commands appear to just cause File Not Found errors.

I’ll persevere, but if someone can point me to documentation on how to use this module, it may help. Thanks.

TVGuide contains the source inside the WWv2Data file inside the application. You can either read that directly (if you’re familiar with BASIC, ignoring the boilerplate around it should be trivial) or download the demo of WimpWorks and open it in that.

It’d be a bit mean to licence something under the Artistic License and then force you to ask for the source ;-)

Ah – that’s interesting. I hadn’t looked at the file – from the name, I thought it was used as a database file for the app. I should be more curious ;-) There certainly seems enough there to point me in the right direction. Basically it seems that you set up a connection, grab data from a URL, wait for the data to download, writing to a file along the way, and then close files & connections.

The WimpWorks environment looks interesting too. I may have to investigate that more too.

I can’t find any documentation for the AcornHTTP module

I’m no expert on that module, but there do seem to be a few bits of documentation inside its source directory