scriptform/doc/DEV.md

Scriptform Developer guide

Build rules

Build rules for testing, generating documentation and generating packages are stored in build.sla. These can be run directly from a POSIX compliant shell, or you can use the Simple Little Automator for convenience.

Inner workings

1. Instantiate a ScriptForm class. This takes care of loading the form config (json) file and provides methods to run the server.
2. If running as a daemon: a) Instantiate the Daemon class b) Hook up a callback to shutdown the ScriptForm server c) Start the daemon. This detaches from the console.
3. Start the ScriptForm server. This listens on a port for incoming HTTP connections.
4. If a request comes in, it is dispatched to the ScriptFormWebApp request handler. ScriptFormWebApp inherits from the webserver.RequestHandler class. The WebAppHandler determines which method of ScriptFormWebApp the request should be dispatched to.
5. Depending on the request, a method is called on ScriptFormWebApp. These methods render HTML to as a response.
6. If a form is submitted, its fields are validated and the script callback is called. Depending on the output type, the output of the script is either captured and displayed as HTML to the user or directly streamed to the browser.
7. GOTO 4.
8. Upon receiving an OS signal (kill, etc) the daemon calls the shutdown callback.
9. The shutdown callback starts a new thread (otherwise the webserver blocks until the next request) to stop the server.
10. The program exits.