On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Bob Houston wrote:
[snip]
> I, too, am very interested in building web applications using Comanche. 
> But before I reinvent anything, I wanted to know if any of the advanced
> features in swiki.net are available to other Squeakers.  Below are the
> features I need to build:
> 
> 1. User login and session management (cookie or non-cookie based)

This shouldn't be too hard.

> 2. Secure Socket Layer support

There is some camp smalltalk stuff toward this end, including using and
external SSL thingy, IIRC.

> 3. Database access and/or SOAP support
>
> The first 2 items on my list appear to be implemented in Swiki.net; and
> I've seen discussions of the 3rd item on the Squeak swiki.  

SOAP is a Camp Smalltalk project. It's being built on the VisualWorks XML
parser, I believe. I've ported the VW parser to Squeak (though the port
and the parser have a ways to go), but no one, to my knowledge, has looked
at bring the SOAP stuff over. (I'll be happy to help on the parser side,
but I *saw* the team working on SOAP at CSt2 and I'd rather drive
furniture tacks into my gums than work on it!)
 
> Who else is building web apps with Squeak?  Please drop me a note if
> you'd like to discuss ideas.  

Folks on the PWS list. Try there too.

>Also, I'd be glad to discuss the pros/cons
> of building a pure object oriented framework for hosting web applications.

Bolot wrote a bit on this for the Networking Squeak chapter and has a few
papers discussing this.

Interestingly enough, ComSwiki really isn't a Comanche based application
(and is becoming less so). Indeed, it's arguably not *Smalltalk* based in
that it's not a *Smalltalk* framework. It has an inheritence framework for
Swikis that's sorta prototypey, and a page/book/shelve dispatch system
(for "actions"). And it's file based :)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.