From: ahoward <ahoward@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T13:37:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Random idea: Procedural CGI??

On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

[snip]
> By that I mean you're sort of creating
> a state machine by hand every time...
> what if your CGI could "stay alive"
> after being invoked and communicate
> with the web server (by sockets or
> something)?

doesn't FastCGI make this possible (asking)?

in general, i think *really* good web libs would help Ruby grow.

two things i've worked on lately (these all work - no vapourware)


  * HTML::Widget

    eg
	table = HTML::Table.new

	table << [0,1,2] << [3,4,5

	table.attributes['width'] = '100%'
	table[0].attributes['bgcolor'] = '0x0f0f0f'

	puts table.to_html

    or better still

      table = db.query sql    # assume this is a LARGE result set

      table.extend HTML::TableMethods	# no extra constructors!

      puts table.to_html


  * CGI::Session::PStoreStore

    session = CGI::Session.new cgi

    session['table'] = table

i have working example of both ideas.  my thoughts are that nifty
HTML::Widgets which could be stored between sessions could lead to swift
development of complex html guis.  what i need is a wasy to automatically have
the query string update said widgets, eg *state*... or something.  bascially a
layer over CGI::Session which would allow a 'web event loop'

if any one is interested in the above... let me know.

-ara

-- 

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 | Ara Howard
 | NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory
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