Using TCL and cgi.tcl to Create and Maintain your Web PageWritten by Eddy Kim |
[Note: Here is a link to the files used in this article. Ed.]
Introduction: How can a scripting language help with static web pages?This article will cover some basic TCL syntax, some cgi.tcl usage and finally some examples and hints on how to get the most from these tools. TCL (pronounced 'tickle' or T-C-L) is a scripting language available on a wide variety of platforms. Written by John Ousterhout, then maintained by Sun Microsystems, and currently supported by Scriptics (www.scriptics.com), TCL is freely available with source. The latest OS/2 version of TCL is 7.6, ported by Illya Vaes, and is available on hobbes under /pub/os2/dev/tcl. The latest one I'm aware of is tk42os2x.zip. This package includes a textmode interpreter and a PM version which includes the graphical toolkit, TK. In addition to the base language, we'll also need cgi.tcl from http://expect.nist.gov/cgi.tcl/ for this article. cgi.tcl was written by Don Libes, also the author of 'expect', the invaluable tool for automating interactive tasks (alas, this is only available for UNIX and NT at the moment). A good description of cgi.tcl is from the homepage: cgi.tcl is the CGI support library for Tcl programmers. cgi.tcl can also be used for generating static HTML (such as this page). This enables you to get programming features into HTML, such as variables, if/then/else, file I/O, etc. Installation: Pre-requisitesFollow the directions in the README file of the TCL package. I've also renamed the text-mode program from tclsh76.exe to tclsh.exe to make things follow my UNIX experience more closely. After installing the .exe and .dlls and also setting the TCL_LIBRARY
variable to the correct location, to test that everything is working:
If you see this:
This probably means that Tcl wasn't installed properly. The interpreter can't find the init.tcl library. Set the TCL_LIBRARY variable so that the interpreter can find its tcl libraries (not the .dlls). Installing cgi.tclcgi.tcl was intended for use in the unix environment, but it works just fine under the OS/2 tcl environment. It is available from the cgi.tcl page as a tar.Z or a tar.gz format which means you'll need 'tar' from hobbes as well as uncompress or gunzip. After decompressing and un-tarring the distribution, you may want to install the cgi package as a tcl package. To do so:
[OS/2] tclsh % package require cgi 0.7.5 % p "test" <p>test</p> You may also want to copy the doc/ref.txt file which lists and documents all the cgi procedures available. Quick overview of TCLTCL is a wonderfully simple language which has a few basic rules and consistent constructs, although if this is your first exposure to the language, it may look quite odd.
More detailed coverage of TCL can be found throughout the web. References are at the end of this article. Using cgi.tclNow that we have tcl working and cgi.tcl installed, we can write a simple tcl script that generates an HTML file. UNIX scripts have the ability to run the interpreter by having "#!/path/to/binary" as the first line of the script. Unfortunately, we don't have that ability. As a workaround, we either execute our scripts with "tclsh scriptname.tcl" or from inside a script "source scriptname.tcl". We cannot use the exec command of TCL because it relies on the UNIX feature previously mentioned. Running the first example, we have a few tags generated:
At least on my system, after tclsh exits normally, the queue to the command window seems to get locked. i.e. keystrokes to the window are not registered. If I click on the title bar of the window, control returns. Writing directly to a fileThe default behavior of cgi.tcl is to output to stdout, because of the way cgi works. When a web server executes a cgi program, it reads from stdout of the child process and redirects it to the client browser. Since we're not interested in a real cgi program, we can redirect standard output into a file, examp1.html, to capture the static HTML. Or with a little extra work, write a procedure that will change the basic behavior of the cgi.tcl routines so that they write directly to a file. So let's do that. Running example 2 shows how it's done:
Executing examp2.tcl will not generate any output to the screen (unless there are any errors) and will write all the output into examp2.tcl without any manual redirection of output at the command shell level. Let's take a close look at what needs to be done to implement this. After the "package requires cgi" line, we load a tcl file htmllib.tcl. This contains a replacement function for puts which is used by the rest of the cgi.tcl library. In order to replace it, we use the rename procedure to 'move' the old proc out of the way and place ours in its place. Another procedure in this 'library' is the open_HTML_output procedure. This takes a single argument which opens that file for output and returns the file descriptor of that file. Generally we'll simply give the name of the tcl source file as the argument which can be found in the argv0 variable. We can open different files simultaneously, if we are using frames. Since the main focus of this article is not tcl, but how to use the higher level libraries, I won't go into the details which are documented in the comments of the library. cgi.tcl routinesHere's a short overview of the routines available to use that are of interest in creating static HTML. The following procedures take a single argument. p string - wraps <p>...</p> tags around the string
br - break tag These format text: bold
Generally they are used within another text procedure:
There are procedures that generate tags that are a pain when writing HTML by hand. These make it much easier. lt - less than <
There are procedures for tables, lists, URL handling, and forms which are all described in the ref.txt supplied with cgi.tcl. Helper functionsNow let's go over some of the sample 'helper' functions I've used in the past.
Example 3 shows this article as a tcl script which shows the usage of these helper functions. Possible enhancementsThis system works reasonably well for me, as I'm not an expert in HTML nor am I terribly interested in becoming one. It allows just as much power and flexibility as writing the tags by hand, yet also allows the convenience of variables, procedures, and centrally located definitions. However, one item not covered in this article is the use of multiple files and how to manage their dependencies if they include outside files. If there is interest, I can continue the article with some possibilities. The helper functions presented here are probably quite simplistic and could be done much better in terms of HTML style. If you have any suggestions, comments or improvements, please e-mail me at ehkim@ibm.net. Referencesscriptics homepage, http://www.scriptics.com/hobbes tcl directory, http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/tcl cgi.tcl homepage, http://expect.nist.gov/cgi.tcl/ Scriptics documentation links,
http://www.scriptics.com/res o urce/doc/
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