On 2/18/11 9:57 PM, Bob Cole wrote:
Read Keith's intended use of revServer, it reminded me of an old program called LiveCard distributed by Heizer Software in the late 1990's. Great name for a program, eh? I was fascinated by the idea when it came out but I didn't know enough about servers and the internet back then. Anyway, I Googled "LiveCard Heizer" and found this link: http://db.tidbits.com/article/931 which is an old TidBITS story. Reading that article, you will see a description of how LiveCard used HyperCard stacks as a CGI. I wonder if this might be the kind of thing Keith wants. I don't know where to find the program. Anyone have any experience with it? Will revServer ultimately function similarly to the old LiveCard program?
I used it, and once for a client project. It was ingenious. The scripts were open and you could read them.
HyperCard was much simpler than LiveCode, so it was easier to do this, but it had its limitations even so. Using HC as a CGI wasn't new, others had figured it out, but putting stacks on the web this way was. What it did was loop through every object on the card and write comparable HTML code to match up button hotspots. It also figured out the rects of fields and their contents. Then it took a snapshot of the card image (had to use an external for that) and displayed it on a web page as an image map with hotspots and fields defined, as a form I think. All the HTML was generated by scripts on the fly. It was slow, but so was everything back then, and it was only a little slower than usual.
When a user clicked a hotspot on the image map or changed a field's contents (they had to click a button to register field changes, because these were really forms) the cgi sent the click location data or field ID and contents back to Hypercard. For a button, it simulated a physical click on the real stack; for a field, it updated the field text. The stack responded however it was scripted to, and then LiveCard repeated the scraping process, looping over the card objects to find the hotspots and fields, and regenerating a new imagemap and form.
It could simulate anything that both HyperCard and HTML shared at the time, which was basically buttons, images, popup menus, and maybe a few other things I've forgotten. It could not do things like card animation because the "cards" were just images. It couldn't move objects on screen or anything that required live, rapid interaction. But it did an amazing job of what it was capable of.
It also used GET requests to keep track of the user's progress, and so could implement a simple shopping cart. I didn't use that feature.
-- Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
