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Re: Kawa Servlets and Kawa libraries generally


As far as servlets are concerned I'm trying to build a nice Scheme API
to servlets.
I'm trying to make it clean enough so that it can be used in a
Scheme/JSP environment too.
This means worrying over questions like:

- should request/response object be lambda's supporting different 
symbolised access to data?
eg: 
  (set! request (get-request-lambda()))
  (set! path-info (request 'get-path-info))
  (set! some-param (request 'get-parameter "someparamname"))
or should the access be more based on individual procs with the
environment created for each servlet before hand?
eg:
  ;;environment already in place
  (set! path-info request-get-path-info())
  (set! some-param request-get-parameter("someparamname"))

- should the Kawa version offer things like init(ServletConfig)?
maybe returning a lambda which is the whole servlet?
eg:
  (define (init servletconfig . servletcontext servletname)
     (lambda (....) ....))

- how should things like attributes be broken down? Should we provide
a *very* schemey access to them or do people want to be able to get at
the Java underneath?

A lot of these questions come down to who the target audience is:
Java programmers using Kawa to script classes together or Scheme
programmers using Java because of it's portability?


*Scheme JSP*
I'm wondering whether a Scheme/JSP environment is worthwhile (since
JSP requires that some Java is still visible) or whether to adopt
something more like BRL (you can find out more about that on the
archives to this list).

My inclination is that a SSP is worthwhile but only in a way that is
utterly simple, I would like to be able to provide a repl for SSP
pages, making tags self evaluating scheme objects. This would result
in a really nice implementation.

An SSP would be usefull since it would mean I could ship a completly
free GNU-Paperclips using Kaffe as the VM and with Kawa as a scripting
engine (there is a GNU-JSP but it requires a Java compiler - Kawa
doesn't).


*Anybody interested?*
If anybody is interested in either of these things, SSP or just the
servlet base please get in touch.

*Scheme automatically from Java Classes*
As far as automatically generating Scheme from Java interfaces is
concerned I agree with Per that a better approach is to produce a
standard library.

I do think that some sort of coperation on defining the API would be
usefull. The SRFI (Scheme Requests for Implementation) was setup to
support this and might be a good idea. 

We could submit a whole load of features to the SRFI process (like
regexes, UDP access, etc...) and implement them in low-level Java.

Alternately how much interaction between Kawa users and Guile is
there? It seems to me that GNU should present a united Scheme
front....



Nic


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