(13) W-KLIC, A Logic Language for Internet Programming

W-KLIC: A Logic Language for Internet Programming

Enrico Pontelli, Gopal Gupta, Kosthub Deopura
Laboratory for Logic, Databases, and Advanced Programming
Department of Computer Science
New Mexico State University
Box 30001, Dept. CS
Las Cruces, NM 88003 USA
{epontell,gupta,kdeopura}@cs.nmsu.edu

W-KLIC

W-KLIC is composed by a collection of KLIC modules which provide powerful high-level programming capabilities to access and manipulate information on the Internet.

The modules in W-KLIC provide a programming layer which allow access to the most important interfaces to fetch and exchange data over the Internet.

The current version of W-KLIC offers the ability to embed in KLIC programs access to the most basic Internet protocols: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and Common Client Interface (CCI).

Software Functions

W-KLIC contains different modules which provide access capabilities to the three basic protocols adopted for exchange of data over the Internet as well as communication with existing browsers and other Internet related tools.

W-KLIC provides the following modules:

• http which allows basic access to communication via HTTP. The module offers predicates to send requests using HTTP protocol and obtain responses--in the format of strings of characters.
• html and tohtml allow KLIC programs to perform high-level management of HTML documents. These modules supply predicates which allow conversion of string representing (part of) HTML documents into KLIC terms and vice-versa. The term representation of HTML documents allows easy generation of HTML documents within KLIC program, without relying on unnatural string manipulation operations. Viceversa, the predicates in this module allows to convert string-based representations of HTML documents (e.g., obtained from the Internet using the http access) to term representations. Term representations of HTML documents allows incremental construction of HTML documents during program execution.
• parse_hidden allows the parsing the string of name-value pairs which are communicated to a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script. The predicates in this module allow to obtain a list of pairs from a string produced by the HTTP server in reply to a CGI connection.
• cci allows a KLIC application to communicate to any Common Client Interface compliant application (e.g., Mosaic). The predicates in this module allows to connect to an existing session of Mosaic, filter all the activities of the browser (i.e., capture documents received by the browser, capture URLs accessed, force browsers to load specified documents, etc.).

Environment

W-KLIC is currently available on machines running Solaris.

File Configuration

All the files of W-KLIC are collected in a single directory. The access level of the different W-KLIC feature can be found in the files

• http.kl1
• html.kl1
• tohtml.kl1
• parse_hidden

Application

W-KLIC is provided with an example application developed using the functionalities of the above described modules. The application, called teacher is the implementation of a Mosaic-based interactive classroom. The application allows a teacher to browse class-notes in cooperation with the students in the class. Students are allowed to take quiz and reports are automatically collected by the teacher.

[FTP]

• README
• Program and Documents in Japanese [1224K]