BRL2

This page is for BRL 2.0.2, prior to the sourceforge move. See the BRL home page for more recent developments.

As of 10/12/1999, BRL2 is in good enough shape for medium-scale use, i.e. applications involving about 100 dynamically-generated web pages. Each page is very fast on the second invocation. If you're already working with servlets it's well worth trying, especially if you're using JDBC.

To try out BRL2, do the following steps:

1. Get a servlet-enabled web server such as Jigsaw
2. Get JSDK 2.1
3. Get SnoopServlet working to make sure it's configured right
4. Get Kawa 1.6.60
5. Get brl2_0_2.tgz and untar it at the top level of your kawa tree.
6. Apply the patch in diff1.txt
7. Run autoconf and automake
8. Change gnu/kawa/brl/svlet.java to find nal.scm wherever you have it.
9. Change gnu/kawa/brl/nal.scm to find sitedef.scm wherever you have it.
10. Get CLASSPATH set right and compile Kawa the usual way.
11. Install kawa/brl/svlet.class as a servlet on your webserver. Should be the same as SnoopServlet except you'll need Kawa in your CLASSPATH.
12. Create an html file with scheme code in square brackets, i.e. a BRL page. For examples, look at the following files in gnu/kawa/brl/
    • backwards.htm: Shows how to use the inputs keyword for HTML inputs, and gives a simple example of embedding Scheme in an HTML page.
    • sql.htm: Will not work unless you have an InterOfficeDirectory database as I do, defined in my sitedef.scm file like this:

      (sql-driver "com.internetcds.jdbc.tds.Driver")
      (define InterOfficeDirectory (sql-connection
       "jdbc:freetds://evnt10/InterOfficeDirectory" "username"
      	    "password")

      You would change these according to what database you were using. Then look at sql.htm for the very useful sql-repeat syntax.
13. If the URL for your BRL page is http://x.org/f.htm, then open URL http://x.org/servlet/svlet/f.htm (assuming /servlet is where your servlets go, as in Jigsaw)
14. Currently you have to restart the servlet if you change your BRL page, because it is permanently cached. This will be fixed in a later release.