Re: What's CL-HTTP good for?

To: "Jeff Dalton" <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: What's CL-HTTP good for?
From: "Byron Davies" <Byron_Davies@mesaqm.sps.mot.com>
Date: 16 Apr 1996 12:08:18 U
Cc: "WWW CL" <www-cl@ai.mit.edu>
Sender: owner-www-cl@ai.mit.edu

        Reply to:   RE>What's CL-HTTP good for?

Jeff,

In our DOW96 paper, "Patching onto the Web", Victoria Davies and I describe
how we put an existing factory database application onto the web with CL-HTTP
and about 100 lines of custom code.  The advantages of CL-HTTP were:

(1) direct access to data, by pointer rather than by name, for displaying
information related to multiple objects

(2) access to existing Lisp software, including the format function, for
creating displays

(3) easy compatibility between our current single-user interface and the web
interface -- in only a VERY FEW strategic places did we need to conditionalize
output for local vs. web presentation

(4) higher performance than a more loosely coupled solution.

In principle,  you could get everything except performance by defining a
stream interface that would hand off the formatted data to an external web
server through CGI, but it was simpler doing it all in Lisp.

For another view on this, check out the ILU Requester at
http://www.digicool.com/releases/WD-ILU-Requester.html.  They describe a web
server with direct connections, through ILU, to a distributed object network. 
They note performance and security issues with CGI, as well as the added
complexity.

For another description of the advantages of an embedded web server over CGI,
see a description of the FUSION Embedded Web Server at
http://www.magmainfo.com/embedded-server.html.  These folks are putting web
server capability into embedded systems, so someday you might see your
microwave oven on the web ;-). 

Byron

--------------------------------------
Date: 4/16/96 10:21 AM
To: Byron Davies
From: Jeff Dalton
Can someone give a brief outline of what can be done with CL-HTTP
that can't be done by running Common Lisp programs via the normal
CGI interface?

Although I've been on this mailing list for a while, I haven't
been able to get a clear idea of what the advantages are.

-- jeff

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From: Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: What's CL-HTTP good for?
To: www-cl@ai.mit.edu
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