Note that the current setup is very preliminary, and hence itis probably not wise to base your strategic products on the information in this document:-) In stead, play with the code here and join the pythonmac-sig, where we I would like to have a discussion on a real design for a Mac CGI framework (preferrably something that will make CGI scripts portable to unix and other platforms).
Next, let us have a look at the AE Server framework,
MiniAEFrame.py.
This file contains two classes, MiniApplication and AEServer.
MiniApplication is a tiny replacement for FrameWork.Application,
suitable if your application does not need windows and such.
Actually, Framework.Application has a problem for AE Servers, due to the way it expects to be quit through an exception, and raising an exception while inside an Apple Event handler is a very bad idea. This will be fixed.AEServer is a bit of glue that does part of the appleevent decoding for you. You call
installaehandler passing it the class and id (4-char strings)
of the event you have a handler for and the handler callback routine. When the
appleevent occurs your callback is called with the right arguments. For now,
your argument names are the 4-char values used internally by Open Scripting,
eventually there will be a translation similar to what the generated OSA client
suites provide. You can test AEServer by double-clicking it. It will react to the standard run/open/print/quit OSA commands. If it is running as a normal python script and you drag a file onto the interpreter the script will tell you what event is got.
Next, let us have a look at our example CGI scripts. CGI scripts have to be
applications, so we will have to make an applet as explained in
example 2. Our applet code,
cgitest.cgi.py is a rather minimal execfile
statement. The reason for this is debugging: the real code is in
realcgitest.py, and this way you do not have
to run mkapplet again every time you change the code. Rename realcgitest.py
to cgitest.cgi.py once you are satisfied that it works.
The resource file is not very special, with one exception: since we want to do
our own appleevent handling we don't want the Python initialization code to
create argc and argv for use, since this might gobble up any appleevents we are
interested in. For this reason we have included a 'Popt' resource that disables
the argv initialization. An easy way to create this resource is to drop
the .rsrc file (or the finished applet, if you like) onto
EditPythonPrefs and set the "no argv processing" option.
The code itself is actually not too complicated either. We install handlers
for "open application" and "quit" (stolen from the test code in MiniAEFrame)
and the "WWW\275"/"sdoc" event, the event sent on CGI execution.
The cgi handler pretty-prints the CGI arguments in HTML and returns the whole
string that is to be passed to the client. The actual parameters passed
are explained in
http://www.biap.com/datapig/mrwheat/cgi_params.html.
To test the script drop cgitest.cgi.py onto mkapplet,
move the resulting cgitest.cgi to somewhere where it is reachable
by NetPresenz, and point your web browser towards it.