Re: ACGI form parsing in OSX?
Re: ACGI form parsing in OSX?
- Subject: Re: ACGI form parsing in OSX?
- From: Reinhold Penner <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 14:07:06 -1000
James,
don't get me wrong. I applaud your efforts to bridge the gaping hole
that Apple left us with when going from PWS to Apache without providing
a bridge that would enable acgis. The reason I don't use your app for my
particular project is simply that I'd like to distribute my app within
my organization with many users. From past experience, I'm hesitant to
rely on external modules/apps/plugins/osaxen, as they usually tend to
end in disaster (even when using installers). So asking my users to
purchase another app to enable functionality for my own app just isn't
an option, certainly not if I can just install a perl cgi that does the
trick.
It is a separate program that you need to install, thats true. There
isn't any way around this at the moment, except perhaps if apple
includes the acgi enabler as the default install with the next version
of OSX. The install process is trivial though, drag it into the
CGI-Executables folder and launch it. Then restart web sharing. It
could be made into a faceless background application so the user
wouldn't be looking at the icon in the dock all the time though.
I think an FBA would be good
I haven't exactly announced the program as shareware.
I haven't announced it anywhere but here yet, but I don't think most
people would have a problem with it being shareware in the traditional
sense. No limitations to annoy you and if you use it and it has value
then pay a small fee to guarantee it's continued development.
I thought I saw on your website that you planned to release this as
inexpensive shareware. There's nothing wrong with that and I hope a lot
of people register it. Any developer should be rewarded for the time and
effort they put into their projects.
I see from more recent posts that this is now working via the do shell
command. I'm going to experiment with extending the handle CGI request
over the weekend to pass you a list of lists of the data already
decoded while keeping all the other data intact. So what you would be
getting is a list like this:
{{ "name", "value"}, { "name", "value}, ...}
Is this the structure that most people would expect?
I personally wouldn't process the incoming stream. That's really up to
the cgi that receives it.
Or would something else be better? Having the program return it to you
along with the other data is going to be much faster than spawning off
a bunch of shells and launching perl each time.
I don't think that "launching perl" is an issue. If it were, then any
perl cgi would be a problem, no? I haven't done any speed tests on shell
scripts, but for my forms, I'm getting about 100 hits per day and that
certainly does not constitute a bottleneck.
-Reinhold