COS 381 Day 23

Agenda  Questions??  Resources Source Code Available for examples in Text Book in Blackboard  In Class Work  Assignment 5 not corrected  Assignment 6 is posted Due Friday, may 2  Quiz 3 covering Perl & XML will be on Friday May 2 Chap 7, 8 & 9 25 M/C  3 rd and final Capstone progress report due  Final Capstone presentation? May 10AM  Continue Discussion on Perl CGI Perl Documentation  Perl Tutorial 

New grading Rubric  Old Exams 7.5 % each)  30% Assignments 5% each)  45% Capstone Project  15% Pre-professional Conduct (see Contract on Classroom Behavior)  10%  New Exams 10 % each)  30% Assignments 7.5% each)  45% Capstone Project  15% Pre-professional Conduct (see Contract on Classroom Behavior)  10%

Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley Chapter 9 Using Perl for CGI Programming

9-5 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - Tags and their attributes are distributed over the parameters of the function u l(li({-type => "square"},["milk", "bread", "cheese"])); Output: - CGI.pm also includes non-shortcut functions, which produce output for return to the user - A call to header() produces: Content-type: text/html;charset=ISO blank line -- The CGI.pm Module

9-6 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - The start_html function is used to create the head of the return document, as well as the tag - The parameter to start_html is used as the title of the document start_html("Bill’s Bags"); DOCTYPE html PUBLIC " -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN " " DTD/xhtml11-transitional.dtd " > Bill’s Bags - The param function is given a widget’s name; it returns the widget’s value - If the query string has name=Abraham in it, param("name") will return "Abraham" - The end_html function generates  SHOW popcorn.html, its display, and popcorn.pl popcorn.htmlpopcorn.pl The CGI.pm Module)

9-7 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley 9.4 A Complete Form Example The example includes an HTML page, popcorn.html, for placing an order Also it includes a Perl CGI program for processing the data, popcorn.cgi (note: use.pl not.cgi) Note, to run this example, you must have a web server configured to run CGI programs, you cannot simply browse to the file on your local system

9-8 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley Race Condition Process 1 Read Data (2 sec) Increment Data (2 sec) Write Data (2 Sec) Process 2 Read Data (2 sec) Increment Data (2 sec) Write Data (2 Sec) Process 2 Read Data (2 sec) Increment Data (2 sec) Write Data (2 Sec) Data 250 What happens if they all start at the same time? What happens if they start 3, 4 or 5 seconds apart? What do we gave to do to ensure that the process works as intended?

9-9 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley Dining Philosophers Five philosophers sit around a circular table. Each philosopher spends his life alternatively thinking and eating. In the centre of the table is a large plate of spaghetti. A philosopher needs two forks to eat a helping of spaghetti. Unfortunately, as philosophy is not as well paid as computing, the philosophers can only afford five forks. One fork is placed between each pair of philosophers and they agree that each will only use the fork to his immediate right and left. What happens when each philosopher grabs a fork?

9-10 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley Contention for a resource

9-11 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - We will use a form to collect survey data from users - The program needs to accumulate survey results which must be stored between form submissions - Store the current results in a file on the server - Because of concurrent use of the file, it must be protected from corruption by blocking other accesses while it is being updated - This can be done with the Perl function, flock, using the parameter value 2 to specify a lock operation and 8 to specify an unlock operation --> SHOW conelec.html and its display conelec.html - Two CGI programs are used for this application, one to collect survey submissions and record the new data, and one to produce the current totals - The file format is eight lines, each having seven values, the first four lines for female responses and the last four lines for male responses 9.5 A Survey Example

9-12 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley File Format

9-13 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - The program to collect and record form data must: 1. Decode the data in the query string 2. Determine which row of the file must be modified 3. Open, lock, read, the survey data file 4. Split the affected data string into numbers and store them in an array 5. Modify the affected array element and join the array back into a string 6. Rewind the data file 7. ReWrite, unlock, and close the survey data file --> SHOW conelec1.pl conelec1.pl 9.5 A Survey Example (continued)

9-14 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - Tables are easier to specify with CGI.pm - The table is created with the table function - The border attribute is specified as a parameter - The table’s caption is created with a call to caption, as the second parameter to table - Each row of the table is created with a call to Tr - A heading row is created with a call to th - Data cells are created with calls to td - The calls to Tr, th, and td require references as parameters - Suppose we have three arrays of sales numbers, one for each of three salespersons; each array has one value for each day of the work week - We want to build a table of this information, using CGI.pm 9.5 A Survey Example (continued)

9-15 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley table({-border => "border"}, caption("Sales Figures"), Tr( [th(["Salesperson", "Mon", "Tues", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri"]), ] ) ); 9.5 A Survey Example (continued)

9-16 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - The program that produces current results must: 1. Open, lock, read the lines into an array of strings, unlock, and close the data file 2. Split the first four rows (responses from females) into arrays of votes for the four age groups 3. Unshift row titles into the vote rows (making them the first elements) 4. Create the column titles row with th and put its address in an array 5. Use td on each rows of votes 6. Push the addresses of the rows of votes onto the row address array 7. Create the table using Tr on the array of row addresses 8. Repeat Steps 2-7 for the last four rows of data (responses from males) --> SHOW conelec2.plconelec2.pl 9.5 A Survey Example (continued)

9-17 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley 9.5 A Survey Example The survey example is keeps track of data from a simple survey There are three components conelec.html presents the form and links conelec1.cgi processes a survey conelec2.cgi presents a summary of the results

9-18 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley 9.6 Cookies HTTP is a stateless protocol, that is, the server treats each request as completely separate from any other This, however, makes some applications difficult A shopping cart is an object that must be maintained across numerous requests and responses The mechanism of cookies can be used to help maintain state by storing some information on the browser system A cookie is a key/value pair that is keyed to the domain of the server This key/value pair is sent along with any request made by the browser of the same server A cookie has a lifetime which specifies a time at which the cookie is deleted from the browser

9-19 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley 9.6 Cookies and Security Cookies are only returned to the server that created them Cookies can be used to determine usage patterns that might not otherwise be ascertained by a server Browsers generally allow users to limit how cookies are used Browsers usually allow users to remove all cookies currently stored by the browser Systems that depend on cookies will fail if the browser refuses to store them

9-20 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley 9.6 Cookie Functions The cookie function takes a hash with three keys for the name, value and expiration time of a cookie The cookie value produced by this function must be passed to the header function using the –cookie key header(-cookie => $a_cookie) Calling the cookie function with no arguments produces a hash of all cookies from the current request

9-21 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - A cookie is an object sent by the server to the client - Cookies are created by some software system on the server (maybe a CGI program) - Every HTTP communication between the browser and the server includes information in its header about the message - At the time a cookie is created, it is given a lifetime - Every time the browser sends a request to the server that created the cookie, while the cookie is still alive, the cookie is included - A browser can be set to reject all cookies - CGI.pm includes support for cookies cookie(-name => a_cookie_name, -value => a_value, -expires => a_time_value); - The name can be any string - The value can be any scalar value - The time is a number followed by a unit code ( d, s, m, h, M, y ) 9.6 Cookies (continued)

9-22 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - - To fetch the value of one particular cookie, send the cookie’s name to the cookie function $age = cookie( ′ age ′ ); - Example: A cookie that tells the client the time of his or her last visit to this site - Use the Perl function, localtime, to get the parts of time ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime;  SHOW day_cookie.pl day_cookie.pl  SHOW cookie_raider.plcookie_raider.pl  Cookies (continued)

9-23 Copyright © 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley - CGI was once a good way to create animation, but now there are several better ways - There are two ways to use CGI to create animation neither of which requires user intervention 1. Client-pull animation - The client repeatedly requests images from the server, which it displays in sequence - Problems: Internet is not fast enough, and if the approach were widely used, it would pull down the speed of the whole Internet 2. Server-push animation - The server sends the sequence of images to the client, with delays between them - Problems: Also creates a huge load on the Internet, and it is supported only by Netscape 9.7 Animation Using CGI