OpenEuphoria

1. For those helping on intrigue...

• Posted by jeremy (admin) Jun 18, 2009
• 1506 views

The name has been changed to webclay, something a bit more meaningful for a web application stack. The SVN repo has changed as well to reflect the new name. I am working on a web app, so it will be changing rapidly as general needs arise. For those that do not know of intrigue/weblay, it started it's life as a generic web platform extracted from the forum here. Since then, it has become very easy to use and powerful. One day, the forum will be updated/rewritten to make use of all the new features of webclay.

Webclay in short:

• Handles URL to Euphoria routine dispatching
• Query string/forum to function parameter mapping
• Type translation (say you have a field that asks for Age, it will go to your function as an Integer, or a birth date, will go to your function as a date value, not a string)
• Input validation (say name is required, date of birth has to be greater than the year 1900, etc...). Validation will take place and upon failure the form will be reissued w/proper error messages
• Template system included (based off of Kanarie, but modified a bit for more usability)
• Far easier to use than a CGI application
• Front end is written in such a way that server to application connections will be handled directly by webclay, thus allowing your application w/o change to support CGI, FastCGI and SCGI depending on your deployment requirements
• Standard server URL rewriting allows for an easy translation of http://myserver.com/account/login.html or http://myserver.com/forum/view.html to webclay requests

If anyone wishes to use webclay or help in it's development, please let me know. It's sources can be found on my SVN server: http://jeremy.cowgar.com/svn/webclay ... A short example of how webclay works is included in the sources: http://jeremy.cowgar.com/svn/webclay/trunk/htdocs

Jeremy

3. Re: For those helping on intrigue...

• Posted by jeremy (admin) Jun 18, 2009
• 1463 views
• Last edited Jun 19, 2009

Sure. Let's say the request is:

http://myserver.com/apiary/find.html?name=Primary&city=Small%20Town 

Webclay works on modules and actions. In the above, the module is "apiary" and the action is "find". This can be translated in any way (or not at all) by your web server. Now, in your actual code, you have things such as:

include webclay/webclay.e as webclay 
 
function apiary_index(integer template) 
    webclay:set_value(template, "title", "Apiary Listing") 
    return { TEMPLATE, "apiary_index.html" } 
end function 
w:add_handler(routine_id("apiary_index"), "apiary", "index") 
 
function apiary_find(integer template, sequence name, sequence city, sequence state, sequence zip) 
    -- do query 
    -- set values 
    return { TEMPLATE, "apiary_find" } 
end function 
w:add_handler(routine_id("apiary_find"), "apiary", "find") 
 
w:handle_request() 

The above is actually a fully working web application. Webclay takes care of mapping a URL (/apiary/find.html) to a Euphoria function (function apiary_find), via it's registered handlers. When you register a handler, you can do more things such as provide a type mapping definition or an input validation function. You can look at the hello world example in the source svn to see how to use those as well.

But with the above, it mapped the URL to the right Euphoria function, it also took the data coming in via a QUERY_STRING or via the POST data and sent it to the registered function. Notice how the user has to do nothing w/getting CGI values, reading POST data, etc... It's just an easy to use Euphoria app

Webclay is not a CMF. It's a lower level tool than that. BBCMF would be a CMF that is built using Webclay. Webclay by itself does nothing of value, it does not come with pre-defined modules such as user management, news, etc... You can think of webclay as a much more robust replacement for:

include cgi.e 

... i.e. It only enables you to write web applications, it is in no way a web application itself as in BBCMF.

It's cake to setup a server. If you have CGI working, then webclay will work. Yes, it works with many web servers. I use Abyss web server on Windows, Apache on Linux and Lighttpd on OS X. I have tested with a few other web servers as well w/o issue.

Install/usage docs? Let's start with the install docs:

• svn co http://jeremy.cowgar.com/svn/webclay/trunk webclay
• Set your web server's root document folder to be webclay/htdocs
• Ensure that .ex files are executable as a cgi application
• Access http://localhost/hello.ex

Now, let's finish with usage docs:

• See webclay/htdocs/hello.ex, webclay/htdocs/form.html, webclay/htdocs/greet.html for documented examples

Sorry there is not more docs than that, but that's it. The greeter example actually does everything that webclay currently offers and is very easy to understand. As with any project just getting on it's feet, docs are, um, non-existant

Jeremy

5. Re: For those helping on intrigue...

• Posted by ryanj Jun 19, 2009
• 1389 views

This is exciting news. I plan to use it for the next version of EuWikiEngine. Also, I want to make a photo gallery engine. Good work, Jeremy!

7. Re: For those helping on intrigue...

• Posted by jeremy (admin) Jun 23, 2009
• 1376 views

#!c:\euphoria\bin\eui.exe 

Yes, that would be helpful. w/my dev box, .ex is associated with eui.exe and it just works, but your line should be there. However, it will not work like that on unix. I wish #!/usr/bin/env eui worked everywhere

C:\htdocs\webclay\htdocs\..\webclay/webclay.e:225 
'copy' takes only 1 argument 
	m:copy(cgi:post, cgi_vars) 
	               ^ 

You're running an old version of Euphoria. I added copy to map's only very, very recently (SVN 2178)

Jeremy

9. Re: For those helping on intrigue...

• Posted by ryanj Sep 17, 2009
• 1310 views

Hello jvandal. You need a Subversion (SVN) client to download the files. Or, use the graphical SVN, TortoiseSVN.