[Seaside] VW Seaside behind apache problems

[Roger Whitney]

I am trying to use VW Seaside running behind an Apache web server. I am 
using the Perl CGI gateway that comes with VW 7.2. I am using VW 
Seaside 2.5a5.21.1. The version of Seaside should not matter since the 
problem seems to be due to the difference way the VW WebToolkit handles 
direct http requests and requests forwarded from a web server.

When I send a request to Seaside from Apache an exception this thrown 
in SeasideServlet>>convertRequest:. The exception is caused in this 
method by the expression:

	aWaveRequest requestURI path

aWaveRequest is a instance of VisualWave.Request. The result of 
aWaveRequest requestURI is a string, which does not understand path. 
aWaveRequest requestURI eventually calls WebRequest>>uri which is the 
source of this problem.

	VisualWave.WebRequest>>uri
		^httpRequest isNil
			ifTrue: [self envAt: 'PATH_INFO']
			ifFalse: [httpRequest uri].

This method will either return a string or an VisualWave.URI object. It 
would be better to return a URI object in both cases, ie

uri
	^httpRequest isNil
		ifTrue: [VisualWave.URI readFrom: (self envAt: 'PATH_INFO') 
readStream]
		ifFalse: [httpRequest uri].

Once this problem is fixed one runs into another exception when 
Seaside>>convertRequest: executes

	aWaveRequest webRequest httpRequest httpHeaders

as the message httpRequest returns nil. It turns out that (aWaveRequest 
webRequest) does contain the http header info, but does not contain an 
httpRequest object.

Before I try to fix this does anyone know if these are real problems or 
have I just configured Apache & VisualWorks incorrectly?

----
Roger Whitney              Department of Computer Science
whitney at cs.sdsu.edu        San Diego State University
http://www.eli.sdsu.edu/   San Diego, CA 92182-7720
(619) 583-1978
(619) 594-3535 (office)
(619) 594-6746 (fax)