Gnuticles - Magma and MagmaReader

Intro

MAGMA lists are a way to transport list of Magnets and additional information in a human-readable way.

Magma lists are a line-oriented text format consisting of a header line followed by any number of comments and topics.
They are based off YAML and will likely be extended in the future to be able to contain more information. The first draft specifies how a simple parser can extract Magnets from a Magma-File and opens them up to almost any additional information you want to convey.

Magma-Specs

What they can do

You can get a glimpse of the scope of magma-lists at the Guide to magma-lists at gnutellaforums.

Ideas and Vision

p2p-Radio

Magma-Lists can contain far more information that just the included magnet-links, while still staying compatible to programs which only read out the magnets. This can be used to stream radio (or even television) via p2p networks, which offers the advantage, that files, which are already avaible locally (like a jingle, the radio-station uses once an hour or songs, which are played regularly) don't have to be downloaded, and that bandwidth gets distributed among the listeners/viewers.

The music-program then plays the files in the listed order and

A draft, how to implement this, can be found at magma-for-streaming-mediav0.07.txt.

Examples

The Python module magma offers some nice usage information.

The Phex (a gnutella filesharing-program) integrates magma readout and creation. You can get t at http://phex.kouk.de, the source of the magma-implementation is avaible via its Sourceforge-cvs-page.

A GPL-licensed sample Parser in Java is avaible as a free beta on this page and might, with some modifications, be usable as PlugIn for FileSharing Programs: MagmaTestv0.36.zip -- (beware of the code)

The Parser now works as a standalone magma-reader in OSX and can be obtained via the following jar-file: MagmaTest-OSX-v0.36.jar --

Also take a look at the sourceforge project-site.
With this you can get all prior versions of the MagmaTest-Sourcecode via the following Magma-list: magmatest-prior-versions.magma

Arne Babenhauserheide