Re: Octave Web GUI

[Jonathan King]

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, John Verzani wrote:

> I've written a PERL/CGI/OCTAVE interface and can gladly share the code
> with anyone interested including posting it if anyone desires. The
> main concern should be security as OCTAVE allows _lots_ of access to
> the underlying system. To work around this, my scripts filter out bad
> commands, and then I take the further step of running it inside a
> chroot 'sbox' environment. I'm glad to provide details of this as
> well.

Sounds interesting, but the point about security is, I think, extremely
important.  I'm sure that somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but
Octave wasn't really developed for this purpose, so there are probably
many potential "gotchas" beyond the obvious ones.
 
> The biggest problems I have is that it is **slow**!. THere is no
> persistent connection to Octave and so each invocation starts up a new
> one. If this is something that one could help me with I'd be very
> appreciative.

This is not an Octave question, but a general issue with programming for
the web.  If you use a straight CGI solution, this will *always* be a
problem.  So don't do that. :-)

If you're committed to perl, and happen to be using apache as a server,
then you might really want to look at mod_perl.  I wasn't paying much
attention to this thread before, but I assume you are also (or will be)
running into more general problems with keeping each user's session
straight and with persistence across calls to your cgi scripts.  Again,
there are solutions, although the obvious dumping/reading the current
session is likely to be slow, too, if people start doing anything
interesting...

jking



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