FastCGI Programmer's Guide - Chapter 4, Developing FastCGI Applications in Tcl

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# 4 Developing FastCGI
Applications in Tcl

This chapter explains how to code FastCGI applications in Tcl. Prior to creating a FastCGI application, you must have a FastCGI-savvy version of the Tcl interpreter. Open Market develops Tcl binaries for popular platforms and makes them available with our developer's kit.

The FastCGI-savvy binaries are extensions of standard Tcl, and are intended to replace your existing Tcl installation. There is no need to maintain two versions of Tcl: the version that we supply will work fine when invoked from a shell or a CGI program. There are also directions in the developer's kit for how to make your own FastCGI-savvy Tcl, if you need a version for some platform that we don't supply.

In many cases, you can convert a Tcl script from CGI to FastCGI by adding a few lines of code to an existing script. For more complex scripts, you may also need to rearrange some existing code.

# Getting Started

The first line of any Tcl script typically specifies the pathname of the Tcl interpreter itself. You must specify the pathname of a FastCGI-savvy Tcl.

Then, you have to divide FastCGI scripts into the following two sections:

- Initialization section, which is executed only once.
- Response loop section, which gets executed every time the FastCGI script gets called.

A response loop typically has the following format:

    while {[FCGI_Accept] >= 0 } {

    # body of response loop

    }

The `FCGI_Accept` call returns 0 whenever a client requests the FastCGI script. Otherwise, the `FCGI_Accept` call returns -1.

# Example: TinyFastCGI

Here is a simple example of a FastCGI application written in Tcl:

    #!fcgi-savvy-tcl

    set count 0

    # Response Loop
    while {[FCGI_Accept] >= 0 } {
            incr count
            puts -nonewline "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n"
            puts "<title>FastCGI Hello! (Tcl)</title>"
            puts "<h1>FastCGI Hello! (Tcl)</h1>"
            puts "Request number $count running on host  <i>$env(SERVER_NAME)</i>"
    }

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