The Jscheme Webapp Guide


In this note we provide a brief introduction to downloading and installing the the jakarta-tomcat webserver and the jscheme webapp.

Downloading and installing jakarta-tomcat and the jscheme webapp

Downloading the jakarta-tomcat webserver

You can get the latest version of the jakarta-tomcat webserver from jakarta.apache.org/tomcat We will let CATALINA_HOME represent the folder where you have installed the jakarta-tomcat webserver.

Installing the jscheme webapp

Once you've downloaded and unpacked the tomcat server. Download the jscheme webapp (zip or jar) and unpack it into the webapp folder of the tomcat server. Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows98 % cd $CATALINA_HOME % cd webapps % jar xvf jschemewebapp.jar This will create a folder jschemewebapp inside the webapps folder of the jakarta-tomcat folder<

Starting the jakarta-tomcat server

Startup the server by setting JAVA_HOME to the home directory of Java on your machine and then giving the command to start the server. For example, in Linux with the C shell you would use: Mac OS 10.1.3 or Linux with csh % cd $CATALINA_HOME % setenv JAVA_HOME /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM/Versions/1.3.1/Home % bin/startup.sh LINUX with bash % cd $CATALINA_HOME % export JAVA_HOME=usr/java/jdk1.3 % bin/startup.sh Windows98 in dos window % cd $CATALINA_HOME % set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.3 % bin/startup.sh Note that to start tomcat under Windows you may need to increase the memory allocated to the MSDOS window. (Do this by right clicking in the upper left corner, then select properties, then memory, then pick the highest available memory, both intial and default).

Running the demos

Now open a browser and view the demo pages by going to the URL http://127.0.0.1:8080/jscheme/test or http://localhost:8080/jscheme/test or http://yourhost.yourdomain:8080/jscheme/test and clicking on the "date.servlet" or "mylibdemo.servlet" links.



Adding new content to the jscheme webapp

The jscheme webapp is the folder $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/jscheme It contains a folder WEB-INF which contains the code defining the embedding of scheme servlets into tomcat. The files in the WEB-INF folder are not displayed by the tomcat server. All other files are publically accessible and the server determines how to process them by the suffix. Currently the server recognizes three scheme specific suffixes: .servlet, .applet, and .javawebstart. These are discussed below:

Servlets

Files in the $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/jschemefolder that end in .servlet are interpreted as Scheme programs that will be evaluated to generate the webpage that will be returned to the client.
Jscheme features an extended syntax (called "quasi-quote") for simplifying this process. The "quasi-quote" syntax uses curly braces {} instead of double quotes "" to represent strings. Moreover, any scheme expressions inside the {} which are surrounded by [] are evaluated and converted to strings to be inserted into the surrounding string.
For example, the date.servlet demo is written using the following simple code, which shows the use of {} and [] to construct string output. {<html> <head><title>abc</title></head> <body> <h1> The date is [(Date.)]</h1> </body> </html>}
A slightly more involved example is mylibdemo.servlet which loads in a library that defines two scheme procedures "generic-page" and "captioned-image", and then uses them to construct a page as follows: (begin (load "webapps/jscheme/lib/mylib.scm") (generic-page "Demo page for ICFP talk" "body {background:black;color:white} h1{border: thick solid red}" {<h1>My Pets</h1> [(captioned-image "Snappy and Pepper" "cats.jpg")] <br> [(captioned-image "Missy" "missy.jpg")]}))
The mylib.scm file is just a scheme program defining those two procedures as follows: ;; mylib.scm (define (captioned-image C I) {<table border=5> <tr><td> <img src="[I]" alt="[C]"> </td></tr> <tr><td>[C] </td></tr> </table>}) (define (generic-page Title CSS Body) {<html> <head><title> [Title]</title> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> <!-- [CSS] --></style></head> <body> [Body]</body> </html>})
You can also create applets simply by including scheme code in a file with the suffix .applet. We will include more about this later.