standalones interacting over the web

[Jim Ault]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 4:53 AM, Nicolas Cueto wrote:

> Well, I give up for now.
>
> Rev CGI scripts don't work easily with sockets, and my on-rev web
> account won't or can't run stacks such as the Rev chat-server one Bill
> suggested.
>
> So, I can't see a way of my stacks communicating with each other  
> over the web.
>
> Instead, it's back to relying on my LAN. I'll modify the chat-server
> sample stack for my purposes and have the stacks connect to each  
> other thru it over the LAN.



The standard way of communicating over the web is using the protocol
       HTTP
and either POST  or   GET  to send a 'packet' on port 80.
... all of which is part of Rev as a library

Go to Rev documentation and find the command 'post'
This will show you related commands.


Port 80 is open on all hosting services with (in most cases) Apache as  
the listener for packets.
Once Apache receives a packet, it determines the helper to do the  
server-side work.

Web sharing on the Mac OSX systems is a checkbox startup, and it runs  
Apache listening on port 80.

Thus you could experiment with a LAN where one computer ran Apache/cgi  
and another ran a Rev stack to communicate with that cgi stack using  
port 80 to start with, then learn how to edit the OSX /etc/apache2/ 
httpd.conf file so that Apache would also listen on port 1987.
If Apache is not listening, then the cgi never gets triggered.
The cgi stack will not care which port is used, since it does not  
handle the HTTP connection, Apache does.

----
A different way of doing HTTP listening on a computer (not a web  
server) is to run a Rev stack that has the HTTP commands in it.
Thus you are starting an app from the desktop that will listen on any  
port you specify.
This way, the Rev app is the listener, and Apache is not running (Rev  
acts like a very limited web server)

I believe there are BBS stacks still kicking around the net for free/ 
cheap download.

and plenty of windows versions, and for Mac,
search google for "Mac BBS software hypercard"  for example.

TeleFinder News (2001)    http://tfbbs.com/news_.spml
Pure Mac    http://www.pure-mac.com/irc.html

Hope this helps you get started.

Jim Ault
Las Vegas