CGI::Auto - Automatic Web-Service Creation
Davide Sousa (Departamento de Informática - Universidade do Minho)
Alberto Simões (Departamento de Informática - Universidade do Minho)
José João Almeida (Departamento de Informática - Universidade do Minho)
Abstract:
The creation of a CGI or a WebService as an interface for a command line tool is not as unusual as it may seem. It is extremely usual and useful.
There are applications developed as command line tools that can be useful for different purposes, and different kind of users. Some of these users might not be able to run these tools directly. For instance, it is not easy to install a bunch of Perl modules to have a small tool working. For these situations, it is easier to make the tool available in the Web or as a WebService.
The problem with making the tool available in these fashions, is that programmers tend to rewrite the tools to incorporate the CGI or XML specific layers.
We defend that these CGI or WebService interfaces should use the already available command line tool, without any change. This interface should be able to read a simple textual specification of how the command line tool works, and buid the CGI or XML specific layers automatically.
The CGI::Auto module aims this purpose: to encapsulate command line tools in a CGI layer based on a textual specification, transforming the command line tool in a web application.
Keywords:
Web Services, Architectures and Case Studies
