The PostScript web server

jrapdx3 · on Sept 9, 2014

Very clever and interesting. Reading and writing Postscript always twists by brain in a particular way.

Having written web servers in a number of languages, particularly in Scheme, which twists in another, contrasting direction, even though I'm pretty used to it by now. It's kind of like clockwise and counterclockwise squeezing the neurons until they protest. My head spins.

But maybe PS is destined to always take us for a wild ride.

embedded · on Sept 9, 2014

This is sort of a blast from the past. Thirty years ago we were writing entire window systems in PostScript - with object-oriented classes and toolkits. Not very practical but it was fun at the time. See NeWS. Owen Densmore and James Gosling were the main proponents.

aperrien · on Sept 9, 2014

This reminds me of a time in college where we hacked an HP print server to add chat services to it... Good times.

jdnier · on Sept 9, 2014

The web server has stopped responding. More details about the project here: http://www.pugo.org/project/pshttpd/

jrapdx3 · on Sept 10, 2014

Wonder what happened? Maybe it can't handle many requests and not responding when busy. Or it crashed. The PS server did respond a few hours ago, it did work, at least for a while.

johan_larson · on Sept 10, 2014

Still waiting for that Brainfuck app server, folks. Someone get on it!

zaphar · on Sept 10, 2014

That sounds amazing, johan_larson, you should totally code one up! :-p

jacquesm · on Sept 10, 2014

http://modbf.sourceforge.net/

kjs3 · on Sept 9, 2014

If you can have not one but two windowing systems written in PostScript, why not a web server. Nifty hack.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

hamburglar · on Sept 10, 2014

I don't think you could consider Display PostScript a "windowing system written in PostScript" so much as a windowing system which uses PostScript as its graphics model. I imagine the actual windowing system is written in Objective C.

eschaton · on Sept 10, 2014

Neither NeWS not Display PostScript were written in Objective-C, as far as I recall they were both written in C.

They also both actually did implement substantial portions of their respective window systems in PostScript. They didn't just use the PostScript imaging model with a conventional "shared memory backing store rectangles" window server model.

NeXT's Display PostScript and Sun's NeWS split things differently:

- NeWS had ways for the UI within a window to run "live" as threads within the window server process, and communicate with the app that owned the window

- NeXT Display PostScript put almost all of the behavior of an application in the app process, which just received low-level events and sent PostScript drawing (and window management) commands to the window server.

But in neither case was it just the PostScript imaging model being used; in both it was full-blown PostScript.