Web programming progress report

[Mark Talluto]

On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 10:26 AM, andu wrote:

>> Monte endorsed Andu's solution and in his several responses 
>> tantalized me
>> into thinking Metacard can be leveraged to do what I want. My personal
>> concern is wether or not as an individual developer with my limited
>> resources can I leverage Metacard to do this? Of, course I have to 
>> take
>> responsibility to learn and study a great deal more on my own but, 
>> would
>> someone be willing to elaborate a little more on how one goes about
>> implementing the solution Andu and Monte have presented?
>
> Here's what happens:
> When you click on a "Submit" button on a web page in your browser the 
> forms data is sent to a MC cgi script via the web server. The script 
> reads and processes the data (calculates things, gets/puts things 
> from/to a database, combines different html templates, etc.) and sends 
> it back to the server which sends it back to your browser as an html 
> formated page.
> (Others who explored this mechanism more recently should be better fit 
> to provide you with details)

Mark,

I am not sure if you want something this basic, but her goes.  I too am 
just getting into this very exciting aspect of MC.  I have only been 
playing with cgis for a few days now.  The example I am about to 
present came from Ken Rays websitea:  
http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/metacard/tips/cgi001.htm

I got this link by the way (ironically) from Richard's RevNet.  This 
app runs outside the browser and best shows what can be done when you 
are not constrained by the browser.  From this app there is a tips 
button.  Inside there there is a single CGI example (Ken's).

My test setup includes two computers, but this can be done with just 
one.
Mac OS X which comes with Apache already installed.  You do not even 
need the server version of X, the client will do.

Step 1
1.  copy the following script into a text editor.  I used bbedit, but 
simple text will work as well.  Save the file as for example:  
simple-cgi

#!mc
on startUp
   put "Hello World!" into tResponse
   put "Content-Type: text/html" & crlf
   put "Content-Length:" & (the length of tResponse) & crlf & crlf
   put tResponse
end startUp


Step 2
1.  Place the above text file into the cgi-bin folder.  I believe this 
file can go into other places, but I do not understand how to do that 
yet.  This folder is located in the: hard 
drive/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables


Step 3
1.  Get the appropriate MC engine in the same folder as the script 
above.  Because the server we are using is OS X in this example, you 
need to download the "darwin.tar" file from MC's website.  Decompress 
that till you get the "mc" file.
2.  Once you copy it over, you need to set its permissions of both the 
engine and the script to 755.


Step 4
Test it out by opening up your browser on the same machine or remote 
for that matter.  If the server is at:  192.168.1.0 then the url is:  
192.168.1.0/cgi-bin/simple-cgi

You should see:   "Hello World!" in your browser.

This is the most basic example for a cgi script using MC and Apache.


Best regards,
Mark Talluto
http://www.canelasoftware.com