Announce: Alpha release of perl-aol, embedding a perl interp into aolserver (very high performance web server)

[Jim Lynch <jim@laney.edu>]

Hi.

I have released some glue code which lets aolserver make calls to perl code
and/or scripts. 

You can find this code at http://people.debian.org/~jwl/perl-aol/ and the 
progress page is there.

I have not packaged it, because the code needs very specific versions
of its major pieces, including perl-5.6 built with specific options 
included (multiplicity, interpreter threads), and this is not available
(possibly for good reason) in debian packages.

So... to build this thing, you would get the perl-5.6 and the aolserver-
3.1 source code, and the version of my glue code in the download dir 
at the above URL. Untar the perl-aol (my glue code) tarball somewhere
convenient, and follow the readme. Those of you who have an aolserver
already running can simply alter the path in the startup script 
(presumably in /etc/init.d/aolserver.<servername>) to point at the 
aolserver binary at /usr/local/aolserver/bin/nsd76 (or whichever
nsd* you use, depending on what version of TCL you need for any apps
running) and restart.

Presently, the nsperl module (the aolserver module that calls a perl
script in response to a browser query to a particular url tree) will
only run the perl script in <documentroot>/perl, which corresponds to
the URL http://your.server.com/perl/. If you drop a perl script into
any dir in or off of <documentroot>/perl/, it will run it as a perl
script by following these steps:

 - get the URL the browser wants
 - translate that URL to a pathname in the filesystem
 - create and initialize a new perl interpreter "object"
 - arrange for the perl interpreter to be able to load dynamic perl modules
 - have this interpreter run the perl script
 - destroy and free the perl interpreter

The perl modules I have made available so far, are ones which encapsulate
four aolserver data structures, Ns_DString, Ns_Set, Ns_Conn and Ns_Request.

It was at the completion of these modules that I released perl-aol 0.0.1.

Next to do is a set of modules that deal with database connection from the
browser, and this capability will mark a second release, 0.0.2.

-Jim

---
Jim Lynch       Finger for pgp key
as Laney College CIS admin:  jim@laney.edu   http://www.laney.edu/~jim/
as Debian developer:         jwl@debian.org  http://www.debian.org/~jwl/