Cgi stuff...

[andu]

--On Friday, June 28, 2002 17:30:12 -0400 Richard MacLemale 
<rmaclema at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:


> It was interesting that writing to a bunch of separate text files took
> twice as long as writing to a stack, but reading was almost the same
> speed on both.  It does show the advantage of reading and writing to
> stacks over text files when using darwin.mc.  BUT... Can a stack be
> corrupted if two or more users are simultaneously writing to it?
> Actually, that's the first question.

I doubt it.

>
> Now the second question.  Does anyone have any experience using shared
> calendar software, and if so, how does it work?  Meaning, if I am
> modifying info for Monday the 3rd, is that day locked out for others so
> they can't change it while I'm changing it (ala database rules,) and if
> so, does that "time out", or leave the record "locked" like a database
> does?  Can two people modify the same day at the same time?  If so, is it
> because each "event" for each day is a separate piece of info?  I could
> do that with mc, but the amount of time that mc will take to process each
> request will be too high.  Right now I have 31 text files in 12 different
> folders (each file representing a day) and mc can process requests in
> about 2 ticks - pretty fast.  BUT, if two people are working on the same
> record at the same time, then the last one to hit the Submit button wins,
> and that's no good.  Nor do I want to resort to "locking" a day, because
> our users will pull up a day to modify and then forget it and no one else
> will be able to get in unless I rig up some type of "timeout" scheme.

This is where the trouble begins. You *must* have a mechanism so that only 
1 person can write to a stack at a time but without blocking others to 
read: some alert to whoever reads it that the file has been updated and to 
reload it, otherwise leave it as it is.
So you need to exert the variable power.
UNIX provides a locking mechanism but MC doesn't support it (yet?) not to 
mention this flavor of Unix so you must create your own and from experience 
this is really a pain in the brain. Look up WebDav protocol since it 
implements locking on writing.

>
> Any ideas or insight that anyone has would be appreciated.  I am willing
> to share these scripts when they're finished...
>
>
> --
> :)
> Richard MacLemale
> Network Administrator
> J. W. Mitchell High School
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Regards, Andu Novac