SPUG: Using HTML as GUI

[Robert S]

About a month ago, I thought of an idea of running a local script-server, as 
opposed to a web server.  The idea behind it is sort of what you are 
describing here.

What would make this so popular is that it would provide much more GUI 
functionality and involvement to Linux.  Many GUI scripts would be designed 
for regular users to run in order to do specific tasks, because non-scripters 
usually will avoid many command line utilities.

Who would design these scripts?  PERL scripters, PHP scripters, and so on.  
Why?  To promote the usage of Linux.  Why should a person write a script 
instead of a compiled program?  Putting aside cross-platform issues, it's so 
much faster and easier to write and tweak scripts.  The output would be in 
HTML for the user load through their browser, and would use the script server 
as a gateway to the script.

I think it should be written in C/C++.  Would anyone like to work on such a 
project or know anyone that would like to?

Robert Seaborn
yrob at mail.crpower.com
http://www.crpower.com


From: Jay Scherrer <jay at scherrer.com>
Date: Thursday 24 July 2003 19:50
To: Asim Jalis <asim at pair.com>, spug-list at mail.pm.org
Subject: Re: SPUG: Using HTML as GUI

> On Thursday 24 July 2003 05:52 pm, Asim Jalis wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:49:27PM -0700, Shawn Wagner wrote:
> > > Enough depressing talk. Can we have more perl questions? :)
> >
> > I have written a small Perl application that does some number
> > crunching and it's a command line utility. Command line tools
> > look awful on Windows. So I was thinking of prettying it up with
> > a GUI. The simplest thing here seemed to put it into the
> > c:\inetpub\scripts directory, wrap some HTML around it and then
> > run it as a localhost CGI script (through IIS). This works well
> > since HTML is Perl's GUI.
> >
> > Here's the problem in this happy story. What if the machine does
> > not have IIS? How do I run this as a localhost CGI script in that
> > case? Are there tiny web servers that can be configured to just
> > run a single (Perl) program? I want to keep the machine secure,
> > and at the same time use a local web server as a cheap way to get
> > a GUI.
> >
> > Any ideas? Also are there any issues I should be aware of that I
> > am not thinking about?
> >
> >
> > Asim
>
> The Perl Cookbook has a sample script running a test web server as a
> socket. I always wondered if this would work for distributed programs.
> Could this work? Jay