"Gary McGovern" garywork@lineone.net wrote:
"Cees de Groot" wrote:
It's still not completely complete, but you can find a lot of stuff to
help
Squeak on the Net in Comanche. Servlets are the basic and standard way any object system will want to publish to the net, so even if Comanche doesn't follow any standards, it's quite accessible. The equivalent of JSP is SSP, implemented by Stephen Pair for Squeak - it should be part of Comanche by
now
or at the very least quickly become part of it (there were some interoperability problems).
That's interesting. Would I be right in thinking there are two separate and distinct comanchies ? I just installed comanche today with apache but it didn't seem to have any relevance to Squeak. But it was a version over a year old.
The biggest thing missing is the possibility to put Squeak behind a Webserver via a custom CGI script or - better - something like FCGI. VisualWorks has this in the upcoming release, and especially FCGI with 'auto-start' (I think that's part of the FCGI spec - what I mean is that on the first FCGI request, the CGI script starts the server if it's not already running) would be a nice way to deploy Smalltalk with any Apache hoster.
Do you know of any work being done on this ? I like to think of Squeak as an environment of plasticity (ie to shape to any task), do you think that goes against the grain of most work being done?
It does go against the grain: the mechanisms are particular to individual platforms! On one platform FCGI talks over stdin/stdout, and on another it talks over a loopback socket, and on others it can be implemented in still other ways. The only IPC mechanism available everywhere is TCP/IP, and that's what Comanche uses by default.
If platform specificity is okay with you, then FCGI sounds like a fine way to hook Squeak to Apache. Check out OSProcess to get started, so that you can actually talk to stdin and stdout.
-Lex