Announcing CWEST Release

To: www-cl@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Announcing CWEST Release
From: Suzanne Mercer Paley <paley@ai.sri.com> (by way of JCMA@ai.mit.edu (John C. Mallery))
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 17:48:00 -0500
Sender: owner-www-cl@ai.mit.edu
This message is to announce the release of CWEST (CLIM-WEb Server
Tool), Version 0.3.  CWEST is a collection of routines to aid in
porting CLIM applications to run over the World Wide Web.  It requires
Allegro Common Lisp 4.2 and Allegro CLIM 2.0 from Franz, Inc.,
including the latest patches as of 9/1/95.  It is known to run on a
Sparcstation, running SunOS 4.x, but would presumably be trivially
portable to other architectures that run ACL and CLIM.  The CWEST
distribution can be retrieved from URL
ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/paley/cwest.tar.Z.  

In its current form, CWEST consists of a lightweight web server that
accepts requests and converts them to commands to a running CLIM
application.  The CLIM application presumably will generate a new
display in response.  This display is captured and converted to a
mixture of HTML and GIF, and then returned to the web client.
Presentations in the CLIM image can be converted to hyperlinks in the
web output.

A CWEST overview can be found at
http://www.ai.sri.com/~pkarp/clim-www/tool.html.  A paper describing
CWEST was presented at LUV'95.  It is available from URL
ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/papers/paley-luv95.ps.Z.  To see an example
of a running application that uses CWEST, visit the EcoCyc Web Server
at http://www.ai.sri.com/ecocyc/browser.html (the intro pages were not
generated by CWEST, but all object displays are).

The distribution contains all CWEST source code files and binaries, as
well as instructions on how to interface CWEST to your CLIM
application.  Two example files are also provided: a minimal example,
and a more complete example that shows the basics of the interface
between CWEST and EcoCyc.

We welcome the efforts of anyone who wishes to add to or improve
CWEST.  For example, adapting it to run with CL-HTTP instead of just
its own lightweight server, or porting it to run with other
Lisps/CLIMs would immediately expand its applicability.  CWEST is also
limited in the range of CLIM functionality that it supports, so there
is room for improvement there.  For example, we have so far made no
effort to map CLIM frames onto Netscape 2.0 frames, though this
certainly seems like it should be possible.  Please inform us of any
improvements you make.

We hope that the Lisp and CLIM community will find CWEST a useful and
valuable tool.  We welcome any feedback.

-- 
Suzanne Paley
paley@ai.sri.com
SRI International