[plt-scheme] Re: Simple UI for delivering simple functionality

On Jun 26, John Chandler wrote:
> It may be that MzScheme's "read-line" would do all I need, in which
> case it wouldn't matter that "readline" apparently requires one of
> the GNU libraries to be present in the execution environment.
> Otherwise, a slick way of handling that packaging issue would be
> very nice.

That depends on the level of comfort you want to give them.  On
Windows, the "readline" library doesn't make much sense, and it's not
needed anyway since the DOS reader does some readline-like stuff.  The
packaging issue is the same in any case -- you still want to bundle up
the executable and all libraries that are needed.


> As for a web interface, I presume that the ISP that does my web
> hosting has to support/allow PLT-Scheme?

That depends on the service you have: if you have a standard unix
environment and enough control over your own apache configuration,
then a common solution is to run the PLT web server on a random port,
and have apache proxy connections to that port.


> And though it may be entirely obvious once I start looking, is there
> a well-known best place to begin climbing that web-interface
> learning curve?

If all you need is a single page for fields, and then display the
results, then there's very little to climb.  I'm sure that the web
documentation can provide enough details, and perhaps the Scheme
cookbook has some useful examples to start you off.

(The climb is getting to be more useful when you have a more
interactive situation -- for example, when you want to read some
fields, then provide another interaction screen based on those inputs
and so on.  Having a continuation-based server means that your code
looks more like plain code than the usual mess of http state
manipulation that people are too familiar with.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!