gawkinet: Some Applications and Techniques
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1 3 Some Applications and Techniques
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1 In this major node, we look at a number of self-contained scripts, with
1 an emphasis on concise networking. Along the way, we work towards
1 creating building blocks that encapsulate often needed functions of the
1 networking world, show new techniques that broaden the scope of problems
1 that can be solved with 'gawk', and explore leading edge technology that
1 may shape the future of networking.
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1 We often refer to the site-independent core of the server that we
1 built in ⇒A Simple Web Server Simple Server. When building new
1 and nontrivial servers, we always copy this building block and append
1 new instances of the two functions 'SetUpServer()' and 'HandleGET()'.
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1 This makes a lot of sense, since this scheme of event-driven
1 execution provides 'gawk' with an interface to the most widely accepted
1 standard for GUIs: the web browser. Now, 'gawk' can rival even Tcl/Tk.
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1 Tcl and 'gawk' have much in common. Both are simple scripting
1 languages that allow us to quickly solve problems with short programs.
1 But Tcl has Tk on top of it, and 'gawk' had nothing comparable up to
1 now. While Tcl needs a large and ever-changing library (Tk, which was
1 bound to the X Window System until recently), 'gawk' needs just the
1 networking interface and some kind of browser on the client's side.
1 Besides better portability, the most important advantage of this
1 approach (embracing well-established standards such HTTP and HTML) is
1 that _we do not need to change the language_. We let others do the work
1 of fighting over protocols and standards. We can use HTML, JavaScript,
1 VRML, or whatever else comes along to do our work.
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