Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Expert Analysis API

[Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 25 May 2004 6:10 am, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 09:46:19PM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
> > > We were wondering if you guys could suggest some additional
> > > things you might like this to do.
>
> Still *another* interesting thing to do, as long as we're being
> ambitious, would be a mechanism to allow taps/experts to be written
> in Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Visual Basic, etc., so you don't have to
> know C to write something to analyze data from a capture.

So maybe the tap exports the two arrays in a cvs format file or as SQL 
commands to a remote database. That would then allow you to write 
standalone applications to display the data, which could be invoked by 
ethereal, and therefore would appear to be part of it. But they can be 
written in any language, and can leverage existing GPL applications.

The code would then be in four areas:
1. The tap, which creates the arrays and passes them to the backend
2. The display invoker, which invokes an analysis/display application.
2. A backend API, which takes the arrays and writes either cvs or SQL.
3. Applications, which analyse and display the data.

Applications could be treated like plugins. Their input requirements 
would be registered with ethereal, and the user would select to use one 
plugin or another to display the data from a given tap.

-- 
Richard Urwin