[MacPerl] Howdy from space

[mark@cheers.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning/Muniz Eng.)]

Hi everyone! :-)

Sorry I haven't gotten back on that HTML/MacPerl thing.  I
really messed up my knee while sitting at home working on
my Mac and have been laid up for a week.  Today's my first
time back to work (where I get the MacPerl list) but it is
also my last for the rest of the week.  I'm going to have
to stay home for at least one more week if not two too let
the knee heal completely.  I just popped by to read all of
my e-mail and to forward everything to my home account.
:-)

Onto the HTML/MacPerl problem:

The problem was: I was working on a program to send an HTML
web page back to Quid Pro Quo.  I was using MacPerl 5.13 at
the time and the web page stopped sending after the program
got to be over a certain size.

What I tried:  I tried moving where the MacPerl::Reply was
located (and later when I found out that PRINT statement
correctly sent the information back to QPQ I switched over
to using that).  I went all the way back to the first
statement - no output was forthcoming.  I began deleting
lines out of the program - nothing.  Finally, I upgraded to
the latest version from Matthias' home page.  Then I
deleted the program accidentally and hurt my knee.

What people said about this: 1)Possibly something messed up
in the program, 2)AppleScript might be causing the problem,
3)I'm doing something wrong.

Over the past week, when I felt good enough to try, I
rebuilt the program from scratch.  I carefully kept track
of how much output was returning to the web browser.  Sure
enough, when I reached 32K of output everything stopped.
AppleScript looks to be the culprit - not MacPerl.

There is a subclause to this though.  Once AppleScript
decides it will not send back the information - then no
matter where I put the PRINT statement it won't return the
information.  Period.  It even refuses to work if I delete
some of the program.  What it acts like is that the CGI
AppleScript part gets overwritten somehow.  Because if I
load back in the CGI script and save it, then it works
again and continues to do so until I exceed the 32K
boundary.  Whether or not this is true I have no idea (and
it sounds a bit far fetched to me after all the CGI script
is loaded into memory and I do not detect any kind of a
disk write to the program at any time so I'm betting there
is something else going on that I am unaware of).

However, for whatever reason the above is happening - it
really shouldn't happen at all.  What should happen is that
MacPerl should break up the returning information into
something like 30K chunks and send them one after the other
back to the calling program.  Is this a possibility?  Or is
it not possible to do this with AppleScript?  If not, there
is a very small C program which Chris (at the college of
Social Engineering who made Quid Pro Quo) has which can
receive web browser requests and process them.  Maybe this
can be modified to be used with MacPerl.  Since it uses the
(char *) type to create a buffer to send back information
it should be able to handle returning information which is
larger than 32K in size.  I tried it last week and was able
to send back a 64K web page I created without any kind of a
problem.  My only problem is that I do not know how to make
an executable which will act as a pull-down module for
MacPerl on the File->Save menu.

Since I'm going to be home for a while, Matthias, I'd be
glad to try to get this to working for you.  I don't think
the programming would be all that hard but I would need to
know how to make an entry in the drop-down menu.  Anyway,
let me know!  :-)  Later!

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