running rev cgi on Mac OS 8.6 Personal web server?

[Robert Brenstein]

>On Jun 5, 2005, at 9:40 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:
>
>>Yes, all you need is an appleevent handler that checks for web 
>>event and replies to it by sending html page. My old starter.cgi is 
>>still online for those who wants to get rolling faster.
>>
>>This solution is particularly easy to implement for people with no 
>>unix background, which is required at least to some degree to 
>>handle an Apache setup. I am also running Apache/PHP/MySQL service 
>>and it is surely more work to maintain.
>>
>>Robert
>>
>
>Robert,
>
>thanks for pointing me to this thread. I was so lazy a programmer in 
>the MacOS 8.x days that I never understood how CGIs and HTTP and 
>AppleEvents worked. I came to figure those things later in MacOS 9.x 
>and then MacOS X (lucky me I came from linux so unix was something I 
>was familiar). I remember seeing about ACGI but I could not 
>understand the thing. Now I just downloaded MacHTTP and read the 
>manual, it's so clear and I find the design so simple and yet very 
>macintosh-esque. Could you send your starter.cgi for me to look? I 
>am planning in stealing some ideas for the next installment of 
>RevHTTPd.

MacHTTP works best under OS 8.6. Under OS 9, it has to be restarted 
once a while as it hits bugs in TCP.

My starter is on http://www.robelko.com/metacard/starter-cgi.html

Unfortunately, I just discovered that there is some weird problem 
with downloading the file. I have reported it already to my IPP and 
hope they fix it soon (the problem does not come from my doing). If 
they don't fix it within a couple days, I pull the file out from my 
archives and send by email. I should probably update it anyway since 
it seems to be still more or less regularly fetched by someone.

I actually have a lot more advanced version of that starter.acgi but 
keep delaying to make it available to others until I port it to OS X 
and fix a few known problems. It is basically a framework for simple 
content management system or extendable acgi, depending how one looks 
at it.


>As of now, RevHTTPd is source compatible with libCGI meaning that 
>cgis coded for libCGI will work out of the box in RevHTTPd, would be 
>usefull to expand RevHTTPd so that it could launch ACGI and/or 
>receive ACGI calls from MacHTTP and WebStar? Do people need this?

This would be a handy feature if it worked under OSX but it can't 
until Apache recognizes apps-in-folders as real apps under OSX. The 
acgi dispatcher is no rescue as it faces the same problem. This means 
that such a feature would be limited to OS8 and OS9. But having it 
will be just a few lines of code, so it may be worth your effort.

 From what I heard from others, WebStar has some problems with such 
acgi's and it is doubtful that this will ever get fixed. I haven't 
tested this myself, though, because Webstar costs money, a chunk of 
money, whereas MacHTTP is free and open source (as aside, let me 
remind that WebStar is really a child of MacHTTP -- WebStar 1.0 
became what was supposed to be MacHTTP 3.0). There was even a spur of 
effort to port it to OSX but it fizzled away. Having OSX version of 
MacHTTP would allow us to run Rev-based cgi's as resident Mac apps 
offering a simple-to-use alternative to using sockets for inter-app 
communication (as Pierre always recommends :) and another alternative 
to Apache-style non-resident cgi's.

Robert