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MCL CGIs
I am new to this list, so this may be a stupid question but...
I have a LISP past and have recently been starting to build a WWW site. I
have pretty much decided to use my own MAC as the server and am currently
using MacHTTP and NetScape to run and test the HTML documents. I started to
work on FORMS and ISMAP processing on the Mac and I found workable ISMAP
tools but haven't found much in terms of tools for writing CGIs to process
forms data.
What is offered in general is AppleScript stuff, but it is cumbersome and I
do not like the limited programming language. Furthermore, when used to
script popular "off-the-shelf" software, it is unbearably slow. Also, for
example, if you script MS Excel on a PowerMac (just to plug some values into
a spreadsheet and get back a nicely and consistently formatted numeric
result) I have to launch Excel which requires at a minumum 8.5MB of RAM plus
it appears to increase System RAM usage by about 5MB (Bill must own a RAM
manufacturer or two).
MCL looks pretty small compared to this and I am sure it will be faster and
will allow me to do much more.
I am not a hacker, but I can write CL code.
Does anybody have a sample of a functioning CGI written in MCL that they
would be willing to give me.
I believe that there is real opportunity for LISP in this environment and I
would be willing (with a little help from a real programmer) to put together
a basic tutorial like the AppleScript tutorial that you can find at:
http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/Computing/WWW/ExtendingMacHTTP.html
I would imagine that with a LISP CGI template that:
1. could be run from a server
2. returned a basic HTML document with standard proper headers
3. did basic trapping of execution errors
4. parsed and decoded forms data
you could entice people into trying LISP for CGI application development.
Again, I don't know, but it also seems that MCL would be pretty good as a
scripting language as well.
If anyone can help me out with this it would be greatly appreciated.
Glenn Forrester