Author:
Frank Lübeck
Needs: GAP in
version at least 4.3.,
a webserver which handles CGI scripts (for example Apache),
Python (version at least 2.1)
for a CGI script and a server process.
Operating system: UNIX/Linux.
Current version: -1.0
Status: Under development, not yet distributed.
Contact:
Frank.Luebeck@Math.RWTH-Aachen.De
Download: not yet.
This package is more a HOWTO than a GAP package. It provides a framework for using GAP to produce Web pages dynamically on demand. It should make it easy to develop Web interfaces to certain specialized functionality of GAP (for example, to give convenient access to some of its data libraries, also to interested people who don't want to use GAP themselves).
The package provides two quite short and generic scripts (written in Python, but could equivalently be written in Perl or other scripting languages) and a description of how to use them. Furthermore there are some utility GAP functions which may make it easier to write applications.
The idea is to use one generic CGI script which packs interactively provided user data from a Web form (as well as all environment settings) into GAP-strings bound to components of a record. This is sent to a server process (probably to one or more other machines over the network) which runs a GAP process with control over its in- and output. Then GAP has to produce some output depending on these data. The manual addresses the security issues in this step. The produced data are piped back via the server process to the CGI script and then as answer to the user.
The GAP code part of the package provides
The Nikolaus conference 2002 pages use a pre-prerelease version of the package for an interactive game and the conference registration.
All comments, suggestions, questions, ideas, wishes ... concerning the topic of this package are already welcome in this early stage.
Frank Lübeck / Last modified: Thu Nov 7 23:52:55 CET 2002