BRL Web Application Workshop - IAP 2001

This event is not yet full. Please pre-register to sipb-iap-brl@mit.edu

Sponsored by the MIT SIPB. See the IAP Guide description for enrollment information.

BRL is a language designed for server-side web applications, particularly database applications. Some of the language's strengths are:

• The syntax for simple tasks is simple.
• Displaying database query results is straightforward.
• Sending e-mail is almost as easy as with cgiemail.
• The full power of the Scheme programming language is there when you need it.
• In this implementation, the utility of all kinds of Java objects is there when you need it.

The current implementation of BRL is a fun toy, but it also is a real-world production system. It outperformed PHP3 in a simple benchmark using IBM's JRE 2-13 and Apache JServ on a Pentium III GNU/Linux system.

Ideally, participants will have a working web application at the end of this workshop. This can happen with sufficient preparation.

1. The most important preparation is mocking up a web application using static HTML pages. Don't leave any part out. For example, if you create a form, also create a page that shows what a user would see after clicking Submit on that form, and set the form's action to that page.
2. For simple e-mail forms (taking cgiemail one step further), the easiest way to try to get it working in advance is to run BRL from the brlewis locker on any Athena workstation. You can also do this if you have your own database set up and accessible via JDBC.
3. For simple database-driven applications, it may be easier to use BRL Cabaret than to set up your own server. It has a MySQL database already set up, and performance has been good lately, despite WebApp Cabaret being shared by thousands of other (non-BRL) applications. The JVM running BRL Cabaret is shut down after a few minutes of inactivity, so you'll encounter some slowness due to startup. Ongoing use has been relatively fast lately.
4. If you are going to set up your own server, start early. The workshop will not include installation help, just application development help.

Here is a more detailed schedule:

If you start developing, or at least mock up, an application prior to the workshop, you will definitely get a lot more out of it than if you start from scratch on January 26.