Squeak's web server

Stefan Matthias Aust sma at 3plus4.de
Tue Feb 8 22:34:52 UTC 2000


>Comanche is much more stable than PWS.  We're running over 10 servers 
>now, mostly on Macs (Seaweed, Minnow, CoWeb, etc.) but also Linux 
>(Herring) and SunOS/Solaris.

Solaris and Linux is important for me.

>and it's obvious that PWS servers are not as stable as Comanche.

That's an important information. Thanks.

>Comanche is somewhat harder to build modules for, it seems, but most 
>of the HTTP details are handled for you.  Comanche scales better than 
>PWS -- we can handle more users with better response.  We're actually 
>trying to measure that this term

I'd be really interested in these numbers as they would probably help me to
find arguments for Squeak/Comanche instead of - say - zope or java servlets.

>Basic user authorization is in both, but I don't know about cookies 
>in Comanche (PWS doesn't do cookies).

FYI, I noticed today that Comanche's cookies don't have correct support for
expiration yet but I already hacked a workaround.  There seems to be a
session framework, but I thing it's not finished yet.  At least I created
my own version.

>http://seaweed.cc.gatech.edu is the Comanche documentation and download site.

Is there already a release date for the next version of Comanche?

>
>>And is there any easy way to debug a #process: method?  A 'self halt' seems
>>not to work.  It seems that the only way to debug is to emit string on the
>>Display.
>
>In general, debugging webserver code is hard.  Got any good ideas?

I noticed that one problem are the "on: Error" exception handler which also
catch "self halt" exceptions as Halt is a subclass of Error.  I think, this
should be different.  A Halt exception shouldn't be catchable.

If you get a debugger and fix the problem fast enough (before the
webbrowser gets a timeout) and proceed, it works quite well.

Emitting messages directly on the Display doesn't help much IMHO.  I'd
prefer if on errors, the webserver would try to emit the complete walkback
on the socket stream so that you can look at the stack trace in the debugger.

However, already now it's much easier to debug a Comanche ServletModule
that any kind of Java code :-)  Immediate feedback and no turn-around times.

>>Or to ask the question of all questions:  Is there something comparable (or
>>better) to Java servlets?  I know I can solve my problem in Java but doing
>>it in Squeak would be a great change to introduce Squeak/Smalltalk at my
>>work :-)
>
>Servlets are easy, applets are coming.

Unfortunately, the HttpRequest object isn't much useful compared to Java
servlets but that's fixable.  At the moment, I'm trying to add (hack) the
better functions of Java to (into) Comanche.

I don't need applets but it's good to know that they'll come.


Thanks for the replies,
bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf.





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