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Re: Simple "chat" facility
At 1:48 AM -0400 8/12/96, John C. Mallery wrote:
>At 12:01 AM -0400 1996-08-12, Bill St. Clair wrote:
>>If not, are people interested in a more full-featured version?
>
>Yes. Have a look at server push and client pull. These can take care
>of the update issue. Combined with window target, they will make the hack work fine.
Will do.
>
>>A portable version?
>
>Yes. This would be a good candidate for the examples directory as a companion
>to the mail archive facility.
The portable version won't display the session(s) on the server
machine, but I can make a pluggable mechanism to allow people to
do so.
>
>>
>>I won't be able to work on it in any but my copious spare time,
>>but I'll likely get stuff done slowly.
>
>This is a nice application and example of thing one can do with a
>lisp-based server. I think there is a premium on keeping it really simple
>and yet fully functional. That way, people can build other intere
ting
>applications on top of this base.
OK. I'll remember that as I work on it in my copious spare time.
I haven't managed to connect with Terje Norderhaug's demo system; it must
be down right now. From the description, it is a full-featured commercial
product, not suitable for a simple example.
I used a slightly different mechanism for generating HTML on the
fly than most of the examples. I put the static part of my HTML
in a file which contains lisp forms surrounded by square brackets,
e.g. [(do-something)]. This is slower and conses more than just generating
the HTML with code, but it lets you change the look of the static part without
recompiling anything. It also lets non lisp-programmers work on the static
part with whatever web design tools they please and leaves only the dynamic
stuff for coding. This isn't really an issue for the chat hack, since
it's HTML is very simple, but it becomes more important (IMHO) for fancy
pages that contain small dynamic sections.
References: