Squeak instead of Servlets

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Jul 31 21:15:53 UTC 2001


"Gary McGovern" <garywork at lineone.net> wrote:
>  "Cees de Groot" wrote:
> 
> 
> > It's still not completely complete, but you can find a lot of stuff to
> help
> > Squeak on the Net in Comanche. Servlets are the basic and standard way any
> > object system will want to publish to the net, so even if Comanche doesn't
> > follow any standards, it's quite accessible. The equivalent of JSP is SSP,
> > implemented by Stephen Pair for Squeak - it should be part of Comanche by
> now
> > or at the very least quickly become part of it (there were some
> > interoperability problems).
> 
> That's interesting. Would I be right in thinking there are two separate and
> distinct comanchies ? I just installed comanche today with apache but it
> didn't seem to have any relevance to Squeak. But it was a version over a
> year old.
> 
> > The biggest thing missing is the possibility to put Squeak behind
> > a Webserver via a custom CGI script or - better - something like
> > FCGI. VisualWorks has this in the upcoming release, and especially FCGI
> > with 'auto-start' (I think that's part of the FCGI spec - what I mean
> > is that on the first FCGI request, the CGI script starts the server if
> > it's not already running) would be a nice way to deploy Smalltalk with
> > any Apache hoster.
> 
> Do you know of any work being done on this ? I like to think of Squeak as an
> environment of plasticity (ie to shape to any task), do you think that goes
> against the grain of most work being done?
> 

It does go against the grain: the mechanisms are particular to
individual platforms!  On one platform FCGI talks over stdin/stdout, and
on another it talks over a loopback socket, and on others it can be
implemented in still other ways.  The only IPC mechanism available
everywhere is TCP/IP, and that's what Comanche uses by default.

If platform specificity is okay with you, then FCGI sounds like a fine
way to hook Squeak to Apache.  Check out OSProcess to get started, so
that you can actually talk to stdin and stdout.


-Lex




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