Re: Beagle Web Interface coming

[Lukas Lipka <lukas pmad net>]

Hi,

I dont really know much about web services development but I think that
implementing a web server within beagle is generally not a good idea. A
better approach would be to write a web service using the BeagleClient
assembly. Then one could use it on any .Net capable web server.
Implementing a web server within beagle seems not really needed since we
have Best for searching.

Maybe someone with more experience here could suggest something here?

Best,

Lukas

On Ne, 2005-02-06 at 12:48 +0100, Ikke wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 22:53 -0700, Vijay KN wrote:
> > Ikke,
> > 
> > An "integral http server" makes Beagle offer web access, independent of
> > XSP.
> I don't see what the pro's are of having a webserver inside beagle,
> compared to using XSP.
> > It makes webaccess a stand-alone feature in Beagle.
> Why must it be standalone?
> > Also, since it is part of Beagle, the DBus IPC overhead needed in case of a webapp
> > hosted on an xsp is eliminated.
> Guess I didn't think long enough here.
> We don't need DBUS calls at all here. Because beagle is written in .Net,
> we can just use the assemblies and exported functions directly, although
> I thought Beagle was designed to communicate with it's frontends using
> DBUS.
> If you're concerned about DBUS overhead: the webapp won't produce more
> overhead than BEST does. So maybe we should just put BEST into Beagled
> itself too now?
> > Beagle already has HTML generation code (for Best) as part of the Tiles assembly, 
> > which I am reusing to support Web access.
> That's not a point I think: export the Tiles used in Best as ASP.Net
> webcontrols, and use these controls out of the Beagle assembly in your
> webapp. Same result.
> > 
> > Since the ASP.Net engine (HttpRuntime) is a separate process, all we
> > need to do is receive http requests, feed them to the ASP.Net engine
> > pipeline and send back the response. I discussed this with Gonzalo
> > (author for xsp) and he felt we could do this within a few hundred lines
> > of code.
> I know one can do this, I rewrote the MS Cassini webserver (similar to
> XSP) while I was on Windows, bridging it to Apache so Apache could
> server ASP.Net pages without using IIS, or starting a new "CGI" handler
> on every request.
> > So, we don't need a full fledged web server added in beagle to
> > offer web access.
> Not one of the same size like Apache or so, true. But I still don't get
> why this should be a Beagle project, why can't we just use the webapp in
> XSP?
> 
> > Another keypoint is that this minimal httpServer serves as the
> > foundation for supporting the web service interface to Beagle. (If I
> > replace beagled.aspx with beagled.asmx in
> > http://localhost:8888/beagled.aspx, I get access to the web service
> > interface to the local beagled). This will allow Beagle to be networked
> > allowing access from other users, devices (PDA's) etc. So, it provide
> > infrastructure to host both a 'web interface' and a 'web-service
> > interface' opening new networking opportunities in future for Beagle.
> I know one can write ASP.Net webservices like this too, but this still
> doesn't show me the need of a (simple) webserver within Beagle. What you
> say here can easily be done inside XSP, once more.
> > 
> > Vijay
> 
> I'm not trying to break down your work or something, not at all (I'm not
> even a beagle dev), a webinterface would be a really cool thing. *But*
> I'm worried a bit about the implementation details. We all know Beagle
> currently has some memory problems (maybe not beagle-related, but
> mono-related). Adding a webserver (which is quite a big object in terms
> of memory-footprint) which is in-memory all time (duh, it's a
> daemon/service) will only make the memory footprint of beagle even
> bigger.
> If this gets inside Beagle, I think it should be at least possible to
> disable it on compile and/or runtime ('cause I can imagine a lot of
> users dont really need this functionality, and are concerned about
> memory footprint of the beagled daemon). Using XSP would make this much
> easier: turning down the webinterface -> kill xsp. No need to restart
> beagled or whatsoever (of course we could have some beagled config file
> using the .Net configuration framework (if that's implemented in Mono,
> dunno), with a key describing whether the webserver should run, add a
> SIGHUP handler in beagled which re-reads the config file and
> blahblahblah, but that's some (useless?) work again).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ikke
> http://www.eikke.com
> 
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