Add MATLAB generator

[DainisGorbunovs]

MATLAB generator

It generates two variants of MATLAB code, where the variants use either:

• web services (using webread, webwrite with weboptions)
• HTTP interface (matlab.net.http.RequestMessage)

Generated output

Web services (webread/webwrite)

Many requests are possible, but not all. Supports only requests with get, post, put, delete, patch methods. Requests with a rich payload such as multiform data or form data are not possible. Binary and image payload is possible, however, is not recommended.

The generator creates the following variables:

• params - query string parameters for the URL
• cookies - n x 2 cell matrix with cookies
• baseURI - URI without the query string
• uri - constructed URI from params and baseURI
• body - payload
  • it can be a character vector
  • or if it can be parsed as JSON, then it is stored as MATLAB structs
• options - weboptions object

Then it calls either webread (if there is no body to send in the request) or webwrite, returns it as a response.

Alternatively, if the uri is constructed wrong, it shows fullURI given by cURL, and sends a request with this URI.

HTTP Interface (RequestMessage)

This is a more advanced API and allows to have higher freedom with requests.

The generator creates the following variables:

• params - query string parameters for the URL
• cookies - n x 2 cell matrix with cookies
• header - column vector of headers, which is transposed into a row vector
• uri - constructed URI from the base URI and params query parameters
• body - payload, it can be a character vector

Then it calls either RequestMessage with the method, headers and body to the encoded URI uri.EncodedURI, returns it as a response.

Thanks / what I found helpful

Thanks, @NickCarneiro for the advice during this little project. Specifically, the below was helpful:

• can use nc -l 3000, then in another tab curl -X POST http://localhost:3000 --data "hello=world" (thanks @NickCarneiro)
• can use Wireshark to check
• can use httpbin service

Findings

While trying to capture some cURL commands, I found that Safari may give a cURL command with -Xnull option. This means that Safari was unable to determine the request type. In order for any generator to return at least something, I am removing -Xnull option from parsed cURL command. See util.js#L36.

Limitations:

Below are the limitations I have found. They can be improved later in another pull request, should that be technically possible to achieve in MATLAB.

• not following redirects
• MATLAB structs can only contain keys starting with an alphabetic symbol, i.e. if we have __type, then we cannot store it as a key. Thus the only workaround seems to be to store everything as a character vector instead of a MATLAB structure.

@cf512, @NickCarneiro

[DainisGorbunovs]

The tests fail because I am using Node v11.10.0, but Travis uses v6.17.1 which does not support Object.entries (see https://node.green).
edit: I bumped up Travis to use Node v7. It uses v7.10.1 now.
edit 2: Bumped Node to v12, so that flatten() can be used.

[DainisGorbunovs]

Please squash and merge this pull request.