Infranet Bindings

[raymond capozzi]

Is anybody interested in Ruby bindings for Portal's Infranet? I have a
working extension that converts a hash into an flist, runs an opcode,
converts the return flist into a hash, and returns the hash. Ebufs throw
errors that you can resuce. This is far better than Portal's pcmif for
Perl, if for no other reason, than my extension does not leak like Portal's.
Mind you this is really a Ruby replacement for Portal Perl. You cannot
extend the FMs to include Ruby, although that does sound like an interesting
idea.

For those in the dark about Infranet, congragulations. Infranet is a
billing system for isps and telco and any business with a napkin business
plan of 2MM subscribers in two years.

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Is anybody interested in Ruby bindings for Portal's Infranet? I
have a working extension that converts a hash into an flist, runs
an opcode, converts the return flist into a hash, and returns the
hash. Ebufs throw errors that you can resuce. This is far better
than Portal's pcmif for Perl, if for no other reason, than my
extension does not leak like Portal's. Mind you this is really a
Ruby replacement for Portal Perl. You cannot extend the FMs to
include Ruby, although that does sound like an interesting idea.

For those in the dark about Infranet, congragulations. Infranet is
a billing system for isps and telco and any business with a napkin
business plan of 2MM subscribers in two years.

Huh. And here I thought that Portal had gone belly up, or at least
et up just like Solect was. (I was a designer on Horizon's actual
billing software, which was probably a better application than
Infranet, but without the cachet of an IPO behind it before Amdocs
got stupid and bought us and effectively killed us in favour of
their COBOL application.)

My question is -- what exactly does Infranet provide that can be
dealt with via scripting? Telcos aren't known for being progressive
that way.

-austin

 

[raymond capozzi]

Mark my words: COBOL will return and destroy all life on this planet to
include that fuzzy stuff growing on my cheese that has now moved on to the
eery green glow of bottles of Becks.

As for usefulness of the actual bindings, that is left to the musing of the
reader. The bindings mealy allow a programmer to access Infranet from Ruby.
What they choose to do is entirely at the discretion of the individual. For
example, you could use the infranet bindings along with the rails web
framework to replace webkit. This would provide a more modular integration
into a customer self care portal. Alternatively you could also test out the
cust_pol_delete_cust opcode. You could make an gateway deamon since the ruby
bindings do not leak. If interest is great enough, I could include a make
define, perhaps -DLEAK_LIKE_PORTAL, so we can recall the past.

I wrote the bindings more out of curiosity in developing ruby extensions. I
never intended to actually use them. At time passes, however, it is though a
new shiney tool has landed in my toolbox and is screaming 'love me. bludgeon
me'. Perhaps that cheese mold has met its match.

Realistically speaking, I would only expect this to be of interest to those
in Japan. Here in the states, we do not use Ruby because, and try to catch
this slight of hand, 'Who else uses ruby'. We mock what we do not understand
(and prompty fry it once we do).