Re: Contributions for the TCL group.

["David N. Welton" <da...@apache.org>]

Michael Link <ml...@fractal.net> writes:

> Cool, I've subscribed.  Do you have any set of goals listed, or just
> a general idea of where you would want the project to go?  I know my
> personal goal was to create something like mod_perl but with TCL
> (and a hell of a lot cleaner/lightweight).  Otherwise ask any
> questions you wish :) Thanks.

Well, a few initial observations about what I'd like to do, and a few
about the code you have already:

I would like mod_tcl to be something very 'neutral' (i.e., nothing
like dtcl or neowebscript built in), and very flexible, so that
something like dtcl can be built on top of it.  I also hope that it
would be possible to keep things relatively speedy - people won't
accept dtcl or nws built on top of it if this slows them down.

As far as your code, there are a few things I noticed:

It's C++ - personally, I would rather just use plain C because it's
smaller, faster and probably better implemented across a variety of
platforms.

It needs to seperate out the 'utility' stuff (like all the mysql
calls) from the core code.  There are several ways to access mysql
from Tcl - and a 'neutral' mod_tcl won't force one of them on users.

I think that libapreq also provides a good API for getting post data,
cookies, uploaded files and so forth, and would prefer to use that, so
that we share more code (the Perl guys use it as well).  This is
another thing that offloads non Apache-Tcl integration into other
places.

Personally, I would also break the Tcl commands into a seperate file,
to help organize things.

-- 
David N. Welton
     Personal:           http://www.efn.org/~davidw/  
Free Software:           http://people.debian.org/~davidw/
   Apache Tcl:           http://tcl.apache.org

Re: Contributions for the TCL group.

[Michael Link <ml...@fractal.net>]

On 16 Feb 2001, David N. Welton wrote:

> Well, a few initial observations about what I'd like to do, and a few
> about the code you have already:
>
> I would like mod_tcl to be something very 'neutral' (i.e., nothing
> like dtcl or neowebscript built in), and very flexible, so that
> something like dtcl can be built on top of it.  I also hope that it
> would be possible to keep things relatively speedy - people won't
> accept dtcl or nws built on top of it if this slows them down.

This sounds reasonable.  Keeping the speed shouldn't be a problem, scripts
and modules are loaded into the interpreter once.

>
> As far as your code, there are a few things I noticed:
>
> It's C++ - personally, I would rather just use plain C because it's
> smaller, faster and probably better implemented across a variety of
> platforms.

Actually, their is no difference with speed or size for the way I am using
c++, none of the stdc++ libraries are used, which would make it more
portable also.  Also the new Apache 2.0 uses autoconf/libtool to find
correct compilers and other configuration options which would make it easy
to find any dependecies necessary for building (and I doubt this will ever
happen, since the code is already generalized).

>
> It needs to seperate out the 'utility' stuff (like all the mysql
> calls) from the core code.  There are several ways to access mysql
> from Tcl - and a 'neutral' mod_tcl won't force one of them on users.

This sounds reasonable also.  I currently have #ifdef's for defining if a
user wanted to use the builtin mysql commands, but could move them
completely.

>
> I think that libapreq also provides a good API for getting post data,
> cookies, uploaded files and so forth, and would prefer to use that, so
> that we share more code (the Perl guys use it as well).  This is
> another thing that offloads non Apache-Tcl integration into other
> places.

I'm not familiar with this library, but it doesn't sound like a problem.

>
> Personally, I would also break the Tcl commands into a seperate file,
> to help organize things.

Thats trivial :)

>
> --
> David N. Welton
>      Personal:           http://www.efn.org/~davidw/
> Free Software:           http://people.debian.org/~davidw/
>    Apache Tcl:           http://tcl.apache.org
>

--
Mike