At 7:59 PM -0500 2/15/00, Bolot Kerimbaev wrote:
>I'm getting back to these... Among other issues is naming. What shall they
>be named? Squeak Server Pages (SSP)? Active Squeak Pages (ASP)?
ASP will be confusing with that MS things, and, in any case, suggests to me
some sort of plugin thing rather than dynamically generated HTML.
Alas, I don't have a clever alternative. "Foo" Server Pages seems more or
less standard, so barring something *really* clever, SSP probably should
win.
>Now, more importantly, is anybody interested in ASP/PHP3 kind of
>functionality?
Sure. Sorta. Maybe.
There's an awful lot of "HTML extention" type languages out there. One
thing I noticed about PHP (for example), is that you start with cool little
simple extentions to HTML (e.g., ye old <?time?>). There, the advantage is
that you "mostly do" HTML and so ease of learning is high.
But then everybody starts going, "Hey, it's more maintainable to generate
*all* your HTML." So you get essentially static bits of HTML embedded in
scripts (write("<html") etc.). And that's just plain icky, and there's
typically no good way to go from the easier to the harder.
(Note: I'm really hating SwikiTemplates. I hated them in PWS, and I hate
them in nuSwiki. It's really really easy to have bugs get "hidden" in
templates, and it's really painful to use the standard tools on them. So
one starts inventing tools to deal with them (e.g., SwikiAdminBrowser).)
But the appeal of being able to embed a command or two in one's HTML
remains high. (I guess; I hate composing HTML :))
A lot of this comes from the "text transformation" mode of these tools.
(I.e., take text, process it, generate new text.)
I'd like to see rational support for templates/ssp as objects in the image.
I'd be perfectly happy with a compiler/writer type thing that took the text
version and gave me a class or instance or tree and from which I could
generate the text again. And I wouldn't mind if there were "fast" processor
that skip the full parsing stage (though I would be a bit surprised if it
really took *that* much more time).
And, let me say, I wouldn't be adverse to our standardizing on XHTML as the
canonical SP/Tempalte format. (If people want to do gross HTML4 type
stuff--though I think they're all included in XHTML--let them use a script
for that bit.)
> You can volunteer to implement that stuff, or wait for me to
>finish what comes before ASP/PHP3.
Er...unless this all involves implementing the same object model/basic
commands of "SP". In which case, much of my rant is more generalized :)
>Here are things I'm adding to SSP/ASP:
>- access form variables by name:
Yes!
> Hello, <?name?>!
>- plus access to other vars (e.g., server IP, etc.)
>- inlcudes (a-la actions for Swiki templates):
I hope they're unified with actions.
> Today there were <?visitorCounter?> visitors
>(unifying Swiki templates and SSP/ASPs)
Er..yes!
What's the current difference? Just the behind the scence stuff?
Cheers,
Bijan.
