[MacPerl] AppleScript Wrapper for MacPerl acgi

[David Steffen <steffen@biomedcomp.com>]

Howdy:

  In my previous post, I floated the assertion that MacPerl with the
supplied cgi glue is inadequate for many cgi applications.  The basis
for my assertion is that a hit to any MacPerl cgi will be ignored if any
other MacPerl script (cgi or otherwise) is running.  Thus, the supplied
glue only works for sites where traffic sufficiently low that such
overlapping hits are unlikely.

  I received a couple of practical suggestions for which I am grateful,
but none of them involved MacPerl.  Nobody so far has told me I am
wrong, however.

  I am beginning to experiment with a solution: use an AppleScript
wrapper to call a MacPerl script (saved as a regular script) rather than
the supplied cgi glue.  My experimentation suggests that this will work
and be very simple to accomplish.  My proposed solution will work as
follows:

(substitute the name of your cgi for foobar in what follows)

- Only one wrapper AppleScript is required on the server; it can be
  anywhere and be named anything.  It will have some constants at the
  beginning of the script (e.g. the name of the MacPerl cgi directory)
  that will need to be customized for each installation.

- All MaPerl scripts to be used in cgi's will have to be in the same
  folder on the Mac and will have a .pl extension, e.g. foobar.pl.  They
  will retrieve form arguments from the $ARGV[0], and output HTML via
  normal print statements.

- To install a script, you will need to place the script in the special
  folder and make an alias to the AppleScript wrapper named foobar.acgi
  or foobar.cgi and place that in your HTML hierarchy where you want it.

  I think that AppleScript, at least as I am using it, does not
implement Server Push, so there is still the problem of long output
causing the server to time out or the user to give up in despair, but
since I think this is an AppleScript issue, I will take that question
elsewhere.

  I plan to give the AppleScript and instructions as to its use to
anyone who wants it, by posting it to this list (it should be short) or
by any other mechanism suggested here.  I very actively solicit comments
and feedback on this proposal, up to and including suggestions that I
abandon it for an existing solution of which I am unaware.  Finally, I
am looking for detailed documentation on controlling MacPerl from
AppleScript.  What I am using I found in the archives of this list, I
think, with references to "the documentation" which I have been unable
to find either in MPPE or my MacPerl distribution.

THANKS!

-David-

David Steffen, Ph.D.
President, Biomedical Computing, Inc. <http://www.biomedcomp.com/>
Phone: (713) 610-9770 FAX: (713) 610-9769 E-mail: steffen@biomedcomp.com



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