John's Emails	Re: Web neurons
Re: Web neurons		Re: Web neurons
To: Frank Schuurmans <frank@bio.vu.nl> Hi Frank, I'm struggling with CGI. Don't really get it at all. I have the Httpd 1.4c Windows 3.1 sever. there's a load of stuff about "back ends" and the fact that Visual Basic has to create .exe's for Windows 3.1. Seems greatly over-complex. I understand that say taking items from an HTML form then passes those items into the URL each item separated by "&". This sounds like it could be used to fire off something like a Web neuron and pass inputs to it. Do you think Webon is a good name for WEB neurON, I'll try it for a bit and see how it goes. And what about "Weblet" for a small group of linked Webons that perhaps do a specific task. I think a good start for us would be to try to build a simple example Webon network to run on just one machine. What about an address book? I already have an idea how this should be programmed using Webons, since it came up in the follwing post:- (Swap HTML pages for "Webons") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: Art Pollard <pollarda@hawaii.edu> Subject: Re: HTML is declarative on purpose [was: Web neurons ] Cc: connolly@w3.org, hyper-theory@math.byu.edu, cbullard@HiWAAY.net, preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com, www-html@w3.org Art writes:- >>You wouldn't need applets if HTML was improved. (I wrote) >Yes, you probably would. As soon as you give people enough power, >to do simple things, they will be wanting to program whole database >systems in it. I really don't believe you would. Any database and database handling program can be duplicated by linked HTML pages with suitable HTML extensions that allow:- Triggering of other pages (this can give multi-tasking capabilities) Data to be passed between pages Data to be stored in pages, and named Simple logic flow (IF, ELSE) acting on stored data names String handling Links to be made/broken Pages to be created/deleted (things I didn't think of yet) all automatically. In this I am thinking that each HTML page represents one database element. It may look like a lot but not that many extensions are needed, just the right ones (IMHO). Databases have to do things like - find, sort, add (record), delete, goto next, update, etc. As a crude example - to find say Mr Jones' record in an HTML address book:- Input "Jones" from the user. Trigger the first Surname element page, and pass "Jones" to it. Store "Jones" as say ARG1 in that page. Suppose the contents of this page were "Bloggs" stored as CONTENTS. Also, that the record number "1" is stored as RECNUM. Do a test - IF CONTENTS=ARG1 then trigger a result page and pass it RECNUM. ELSE, trigger the next Surname element page (in record 2) and pass it "Jones" Carry on until you get a match, or the last element passes say "No match" to the results page. The record number could be stored as text in the results page and displayed. Note there is no need for a search Loop as in standard languages. Only one simple IF ELSE per element page. In fact maybe Looping should be banned. This does involve a radically different programming strategy. Each database element now becomes a sort of "object" with its own code, and with explicit links to other elements. I wish I lived in Hawaii too. [end of post] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ So can we duplicate this with CGI scripts? Assuming we are running on just one machine one Webon should be able to fire another in the Weblet without going back to the server. The URL would just be the filename in this case. You also need an interpreter to go through the code in each Webon. >The cgi firing equivelant wouldn't be in the HTML page itself but in the url: >/cgi-bin/fire/foo.html ->fire it >/cgi-bin/view/foo.html ->view >/cgi-bin/edit/foo.html ->edit >etc. So you must be saying that foo.html is a Webon. I presume that embedding "FIRE" somewhere in the URL tells the server to execute foo.html rather than view it or edit it. But is /fire a directory? Are there three copies of foo.html in three directories? I really don't know anything about CGI. If, after firing foo.html, foo.html itself has a fire command for say foo2.html (in the same directory), what would be the exact process of getting foo2.html to fire. What is doing the interpreting of the lines in foo.html? In the conventional sense this would be done by the browser, say Netscape. But I don't see anything like Netscape here. What type of CGI script do you use.. PERL, VB? I can't program anything yet because I'm not set up for it. Look forward to your reply. By the way, what does "Drs" mean?