
The PostScript web server - mmastrac
http://www.pugo.org:8080/
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jrapdx3
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.

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embedded
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.

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

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

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jrapdx3
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.

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

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

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jacquesm
[http://modbf.sourceforge.net/](http://modbf.sourceforge.net/)

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kjs3
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS) 2)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript)

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hamburglar
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.

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eschaton
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.

