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Re: A Thought on CGI & CL-HTTP
>
>Would it be beneficial for mcl/CL-HTTP implementation do define a standard
>"foreign function interface" analogy to the CGI standard to establish an
>"open" environment for the community of developers?
>
>John Hanna
yes.
An export type for invoking standard MAC CGI scripts is a high priority for
the MAC CL-HTTP and has been on the list of recommend coding projects for
sometime now.
*** This would be a really useful contribution if some cares to hack up an
applescript CGI export method.
The goal would be to be able to run any CGI script written for other servers.
There is a contribution in the MCL FTP directory for invoking Apple scripts from
MCL and it has been updated for MCL 3.0. To implement this, one would specialize
the computed-url class and provide a method for invoking the script and
capturing
the returns. A new export method would also be needed.
At another level, there is the foreign function interface in MCL. This facility
can be used to provide lisp interfaces to other programs in the MAC OS.
The ease and rapidity with which one can create lisp interfaces then expands
the range of applications that can be "scripted" from MCL and incorporated
into CL-HTTP web service.
Here we see a key point: the transaction costs of integrating applications
follow directly from the transaction costs of crossing language boundaries.
One component is the difficulty of crossing the boundary and aother is
the breadth of the window across it (narrower in CGI/Applescript than
foriegn function calling).
In the case of the Lisp Machine, we had one language throughout the operating
system, and thereore, zero transactions costs.