Rivet

Apache Rivet is the next generation of mod_dtcl and NeoWebScript, combined: "like PHP, but with Tcl."

Attributes

website

http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/

current version

3.2.1

Description

Rivet "lets you program in not only mixed HTML/Tcl, but also pure Tcl, which is good for separating content and presentation."

Current developers of Rivet are Massimo Manghi, Harald Oehlmann, George Petasis, Karl Lehenbauer and sometimes Damon Courtney. David Welton,Brad Morrison,Pat Thoyts and Andy Doerr have all greatly contributed in the past.

** Rivet 3.0 Release Notes

Rivet 3.0 is tested and works with the Apache Webserver version 2.4 (running any MPM) and requires Tcl >= 8.6.1. Rivet 3.0 now supports also the Apache Web server when running with the MS-Windows family of operative systems. The module has been built on MS-Windows through the CMake build system using the Visual Studio Community 2017 compiler.

Version 3.0 is a drop-in replacement of any earlier version of Rivet but there are new features that can deeply change the way you have so far developed your Rivet based applications

Download

You can get Rivet from the download page of the project. Rivet is available as package for many Unix-like systems. Check your Unix/Linux package manager (Debian/Ubuntu derived Linux distribution call the package libapache2-mod-rivet

Apache Rivet still is not distributing an official Windows binary package. Any Tcl developer wishing contribute by packaging Rivet for Windows is welcome to step forward and join us at [email protected] ([email protected] to subscribe to the Rivet mailing list)

OpenSUSE offers Rivet for various versions of their Linux distribution and for CentOS.

Installation

Rivet - OpenBsd 4.9: PWQ 2011-09-27: installation notes on OpenBSD.

Tcl and Rivet on Windows: Starting with version 3.0 Rivet runs also with the Windows port of Apache. Rivet on Windows was built using CMake and the Visual Studio Community 2017 compiler

Apache MPM and Rivet Bridge Modules

Rivet 3.0 was a major rewriting of mod_rivet, the Apache HTTP Websever module at the core of Rivet. Unlike in previous versions of mod_rivet which only supported the prefork MPM (Multiprocessing Module ), starting with 3.0 we attained full support of different MPM for the Apache framework. Threaded MPM integration was achieved by making mod_rivet multithreaded and modular itself, introducing the mod_rivet/MPM bridge concept. We developed a set of loadable modules which are supposed not only to overcome the issues related to threading but also to offer the best possible MPM mod_rivet integration. As a side effect of this modular design, mod_rivet is not only able to integrate with its environment, but also to work as a framework for writing more MPM bridges designed along different multi-threading schemes and workload management models. See the internals section of the rivet manual for further reading. MPM bridges are loaded accordingly to a heuristics of rules based on the Apache introspection calls, but they can be determined in the configuration. Only a bridge can be loaded at a time.

Community

   [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tcl-rivet-dev/%|%rivet-dev mailing list]: 

Examples

Rivet HTTP REST service example

News

13-11-2021: Rivet 3.2.1 released

See Also

THP

CAU: an alternative to Rivet; A webserver-neutral way to embed Tcl code.

RivetCGI, by Roy Keene

A port of Rivet to CGI.

Discussion

FW: Was this made by the same people as NWS and mod_dtcl, or is it a separate team of developers?

Can we have some testimonials by Rivet users? (sorry, i'm new to servers in general)

1. how do you connect to a db, tcl db extensions?
2. is an apache instance with rivet and tomcat possible? encouraged?
3. mod_rewrite in the midst of all this, or is that only available on top of a tomcat instance?
4. are importing libraries like tcllib a piece of cake after rivets installed?

i want to run a dual java/tcl environment...

davidw: I think these questions are more appropriate for the newsgroup or the rivet mailing list, but I'll give it a shot:

1) You use regular Tcl database extensions. Rivet is pretty much standard Tcl, making a lot of the code you write for it reusable on or off the web.

2) I've never mixed Apache and Tomcat. I don't really care for Java for these sorts of things unless you have a *big* infrastructure, and that's not something I've dealt with a lot.

3) mod_rewrite is an Apache thing and it works just fine with Rivet. In fact, it's encouraged if you want to do things like have one rivet script respond to a whole virtual directory tree. So /foo/bar/ /foo/baz/ /foo/bee/bop and so forth are all mapped to foo.tcl?bar foo.tcl?baz foo?bee+bop and so forth.

4) tcllib and other libs are a piece of cake:-)

RLH: Are there any Rivet tutorials mucking about?

Massimo Manghi: Rivet manuals have examples for both configuration and programming. Rivet extends Tcl with a small set of new commands dedicated to web programming and therefore having a good Tcl manual can be useful, depending on the familiarity of the developer with the language.

davidw: Not yet, but Rivet is very similar to plain old Tcl, and the differences are covered in the documentation.

As far as programming style, if you are doing something simple... just go ahead and mix your HTML and Tcl code. If it's a more complex app, separate things out into .tcl files that act as the logic and use .rvt files simply as templates.

Or write the mailing list for more specific questions...

RLH: I am looking for something similiar to HTML::Template [L1 ] from the Perl side of the house. I like the clean separation of code and HTML. : )

That perl template stuff just adds funny tags, which are not standard HTML. If you want to separate code and templates, do your processing in a .tcl file, then do "parse foo.rvt", and in the .rvt file, put statements like <? puts $foo ?> <? puts $bar?> where you need variable values. Or if you really wanted to do something fancy, you could call the parse.rvt in its own namespace/interpreter/whatever from the .tcl file, and create procs that are aliases to your variables, so all you have to do is <?foo?> <?bar?> in order to get output. I suppose a standardized way of doing this would be nice, but it is pretty easy... experiment and tell us (on the list, please) what you end up liking!

RLH: You are correct about the funny tags, I meant more of a "standard way of doing this..." as you said. I will go with your suggestions. I am far from good enough to create the "standard way" though. : )

RLH 2006-02-07: Are there any hosting companies that support Rivet?

Roy Keene 2008-10-06: Any Rivet application can be turned into an HTTP/CGI application. And with Starpacks the entire thing can be completely self-contained in one file.

APW 2007-01-20: if you have problems installing Tcl and Rivet on Windows follow the link.

Roy Keene 2008-10-05: Rivet can also be implemented transparently using CGI. This has the advantage of using "suEXEC" and working well with all versions of Apache. More information can be found on the Rivet/CGI page ([L2 ])

Roy Keene 2009-03-20: Rivet/CGI ([L3 ]) now supports converting a Rivet application into a Starkit (which can be turned into a Starpack)

2012-07-07: Massimo Manghi gave a speech on EuroTCL . The slides gave a good overview of current Rivet capabilities.

# cd /usr/lib(64)
# ln -s /usr/local/lib(64)/libtcl8.5.so

LoadModule mod_rivet /etc/httpd/modules/mod_rivet.so

LoadModule rivet_module /etc/httpd/modules/mod_rivet.so

     -> there is a new method in 2.0.5 to easily parse this

if {[catch {
    set resultData [wwwbaseProductDataGet\
        [env REMOTE_ADDR]\
        [var get log]\
        $response(key)\
        {}\
        $response(country)\
        $response(language)\
        $response(date)\
        $response(format)]
} Err dErr]} {
    switch -exact -- [dict get $dErr -errorcode] {
        PARAM {
            # > Return 400 Bad request
            wwwbaseCacheSet 1
            headers numeric 400
        }
        NOT_FOUND {
            # > Return 404 Not found
            wwwbaseCacheSet 1
            headers numeric 404
        }
        default {
            # > Return 500 Internal server error
            wwwbaseCacheSet 0
            headers numeric 500
        }
    }
    switch -exact -- $response(format) {
        csv {
            puts Error\n$Err
        }
        json {
            puts "\{error: \"$Err\"\}"
        }
        xml {
            puts "<error>$Err</error>"
        }
        html {
            puts "<html><head><title>\
                    [mce PageTitleProductRequest]</title>\
                    <body><h1>[mce ErrSearch $Err]</h1></body>"
        }
        form {
            switch -exact -- [dict get $dErr -errorcode] {
                PARAM {
                    puts [mce ErrParam $Err]
                }
                NOT_FOUND {
                    puts [mce ErrSearch $Err]
                }
                default {
                    puts [mce ErrServer $Err]
                }
            }
            # puts $Err<br/>[string map {\n <br/>} $::errorInfo]
        }
    }
} else {
    # > Correct response is cacheable
    wwwbaseCacheSet 1
    switch -exact -- $response(format) {
        csv {
            headers set Content-Disposition\
                    "attachment; filename=product.csv"
        }
        form {
            puts {} 
        }
    }
    puts -nonewline $resultData
    
}

proc ::wwwbase::wwwbaseCacheSet {{fCacheable 1}} {
    if {$fCacheable} {
        headers set Cache-Control max-age=86400,must-revalidate
    } else {
        headers set Cache-Control no-cache,no-store
    }
}

yum groupinstall Entwicklungs-Tools

yum groupinstall "Development tools"

yum install httpd-devel

test "$libdir" = '${exec_prefix}/lib' && libdir='${exec_prefix}/lib64'
true

cd test
gzip -d tcl8.6.0.tar.gz
tar xvf tcl8.6.0.tar.gz
cd tcl8.6.0/unix
./configure
make

su
make install
cd /usr/lib64
ln -s /usr/local/lib64/libtcl8.6.so

cd test
gzip -d rivet-2.1.1.tar.gz
tar xvf rivet-2.1.1.tar
cd rivet-2.1.1
./configure --with-tcl=/usr/local/lib64 --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-tclsh=/usr/local/bin/tclsh8.6 --with-apache-version=2 --with-rivet-target-dir=/usr/local/lib64/rivet --enable-version-display --enable-64bit
make

su
make install

# load the module
LoadModule rivet_module modules/mod_rivet.so

# Let the module handle .rvt and .tcl files.
AddType application/x-httpd-rivet  rvt
AddType application/x-rivet-tcl    tcl

# The default charset can be specified in the configuration
AddType "application/x-httpd-rivet; charset=utf-8" rvt

# Add index.rvt to the list of files that will be served
DirectoryIndex index.rvt

service httpd restart

$ aclocal
$ autoreconf
$ ./configure --with-tcl=/usr/lib --with-apache-version=2 \
     --with-tclsh=/usr/bin/tclsh --with-apache=/usr \
     --with-rivet-target-dir=/usr/lib/myrivetlib \
     --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs2
$ make
$ su
% ake install

   `vi /etc/apache2/mod_rivet.conf` and added in it:

AddType application/x-httpd-rivet  rvt
AddType application/x-rivet-tcl    tcl
AddType "application/x-httpd-rivet; charset=utf-8" rvt

   Navigate to Network Service->HTTP->modules
   Add "rivet" to APACHE_MODULES

% cd rivet2.1.2
% make install-packages

$ vi /srv/www/htdocs/test.rvt

<?
 package require Rivet
 package require Session
 package require DIO
 package require form

 puts "<b>I got right here!</b>"
?>

% service apache2 start

   point the browser to url = localhost/test.rvt

   and got the magic "I got right here!".