---
title: "Of alligators and bloxsoms"
date: 2002-05-22T14:40:50-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2002/05/22/oooafa/
author: Les Orchard
---

# Of alligators and bloxsoms

<p>From <a href="http://chris.wiw.org/2002/05/22#200205111043">Chris Heschong</a>:<blockquote><i>...While I don't believe it's 100% done, I've put up the code to my new pet <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> aggregator <a href="http://wiw.org/~chris/pet/alligator">here</a> for the moment. More to come shortly.</i></blockquote>A nice, simple <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> aggregator in <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PHP">PHP</a> that seems to run nicely on my iBook.  Planning on poking at it some more, so I hope the <a href="http://wiw.org/~chris/pet/alligator">alligator</a> is of the non-bitey variety.</p>
<p>As Rael's little <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael/lang/perl/blosxom/">blosxom</a> has hinted at, OS X has the potential to be the perfect end-user desktop website platform.  I even had <a href="http://www.movabletype.org">Movable Type</a> running on it without much fuss.  If only Apple had shipped with mod_perl and <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PHP">PHP</a> modules active in Apache, it would be that much more amazing.  I suppose that's easy enough to rectify.  </p>
<p>Makes me feel strange running <a href="http://radio.userland.com">Radio <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/UserLand">UserLand</a></a> on my OS X iBook, besides the CPU consumption.  So much duplication of what's already there.  Of course, there are the plusses of cross-platform goodness, integrated environment goodness, and things that just feel generally slick about it.  Eh, but I don't have to feel strange about that anymore, since I moved Radio to my Windows box.  Now Radio fights with my PVR program for CPU.  Grr.</p>
<p>I've been thinking about this lately, too: Cocoa GUI talking via XML-RPC or SOAP to a web app locally hosted.  It's been mused about before, though I forget where.  I seem to remember that <a href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com">Dave</a> had mentioned a company working on something like this.  Could be interesting.</p>
<p>Seems to me that the potential and power of OS X for these sorts of apps (ie. desktop websites, networked info filters, etc...) has barely been tapped yet.</p>
<p>Unix on the desktop.  Really.  Who woulda thunk it?</p>
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shortname=oooafa

<div id="comments" class="comments archived-comments">
            <h3>Archived Comments</h3>
            
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        <li class="comment" id="comment-221082914">
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                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.rolandtanglao.com"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2aae7897dc9617da7c27a5ebf1681afd&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.rolandtanglao.com">Roland Tanglao</a>
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                <a href="#comment-221082914" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-05-29T07:45:22">2002-05-29T07:45:22</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Six Degrees on the Mac uses a Cocoa GUI talking via XML-RPC to its backend:

http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$2178</div>
            
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        <li class="comment" id="comment-221082918">
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                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2ac2cffd36ada8c734b90e02a1e5c1ac&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com">l.m.orchard</a>
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                <a href="#comment-221082918" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-05-30T16:53:31">2002-05-30T16:53:31</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Great!  That's the product about which I'd forgotten, thanks for the reminder!</div>
            
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