ANNOUNCE: perl-aol project. Ties a perl interpreter closely to aolserver.

[Jim Lynch <jim@laney.edu>]

Hi.

perl-aol is a project (-not- yet a package) whose aim is to add closely-knit
perl capability to  aolserver (a high-performance web server rich with
features).

I am writing to ask people to try to build the project and get the
example perl scripts running. I also ask for commentary, on the 
sourceforge forums for aolserver.

Aolserver has a built-in TCL interpreter which is "wired" close to it;
after working with TCL, I thought it came up kinda short, so I started
this project, which aims to let perl do within aolserver anything its
embedded TCL can do, including be the aolserver config file language,
talk to a pool of already-open SQL server connections, return content
to the browser (through what I see as a connection object) and call and
be called by both aolserver and the TCL interp (this would allow callbacks
and the use of already-written programs in aolserver's TCL -- such as the
ArsDigita Community System.

So, eventually one can make use of the ACS -without- recoding it from its
chosen language. (This is not possible now; I have written no glue of
perl to TCL yet.)

Both aolserver and perl can be distributed under the GPL, and so can
perl-aol.

At the time of this writing, perl scripts can return content to browsers
and not much else. This is not as small as it sounds; you can do active
content, and the perl interpreter is capable of having installed, and
later loading of any dynamic perl module available on CPAN.

Because of the way the perl has to be built, it is -not- compatible 
with any perl modules installed as binaries in debian. You will have
to get the source of any modules you may want and build/install them
on the (specially-built) perl.

More info is available in these places:

perl-aol sourceforge project

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/perl-aol/

progress (this loc will likely change)

    http://people.debian.org/~jwl/perl-aol/progress.html

aolserver in-an-of-itself

    http://www.aolserver.com

and for perl there are many sources of info. Complete references
are normally installed on any machine that has perl. More info
can be found in these places:

    http://www.perl.org/
    http://cpan.perl.org/
    http://www.perl.com/

-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/