[Lispweb] Re: Webactions

[John Foderaro]

>> Do you do it the Allegroserve way where you
>> generate the entire page, or do you publish the path to the image
>> using the session key for the user, or some other way?

either way will work.  If it's a full page image and thus doesn't
have any links it doesn't matter that it not be a webactions managed
page.

However since the image was generated dynamically you're going to want
to gc it after a bit.   If you cause the user's browers
to go to the image alone:
    http://mysite.com/foo2423423413421342134.jpg
then they may bookmark it and that bookmark will then fail sometime
in the near future.

I think it's better to send them to a webactions page that
contains an embedded image link, then you can do something reasonable
if they come back to this page after the image is long gone.

>> https. Do you simply start aserve with the ssl argument set to
>>    true? 
 you pass a pem encoded server certificate as the value of the ssl argument.
 We supply a sample one you can use (but your browser will complain
about it being out of date -- just ignore that).

 
>> Any other ways to elegantly handle access using bot https and
>> http?

 you can run both an http and an https server in the same lisp.
beware though that you'll have to then worry about getting two
distinct wserver objects, one to describe each server.  If you fail
to do this then starting a second server will shut down the first server.

If you want both server to share the same session space this should
be do-able by manually ensuring that both websessions share the same
session master.   I've never tried this but if you're interested and
can't see how it's done let me know and I'll try it myself.


>> 3) Limit the size of uploaded files. There is a way to do this under
>>   Allegroserve, but what is the recommended method under Webactions?
 
 When you upload a file the browser will be sending a POST of content type
multipart/form-data.   With both AllegroServe and Webactions you the 
website designer must write the code to read the form data in 
this case. We provide help you do the reading and one of them
(get-all-multipart-data) obeys any size limits you may wish to impose.

You'll need to write a clp function to do the form data reading.
The allegroserve examples file shows a few ways to read form data.