Wt

Hi.

There are some hints here.

Yup, that's an excellent link. If you still have questions, feel free to ask for clarification.

Some background: your normal scenario looks fine for traditional simple web application development. There is a magical part that you didn't mention: the application that sends that HTML, js, and css to the client. It doesn't just send the content, it also decides whether to send the content, etc. Normally, this may be the Apache HTTPD server; you give it a Document Root (where it should look on the host for web content), and it listens for requests from clients and sends the appropriate content.

When you're using the Web Toolkit, it is the Web Toolkit httpd application that listens to and interprets requests. Unlike the Apache httpd, webkit httpd does not serve html files. Instead, it generates the html content according to the webkit application you wrote.

What this means is: if you're accustomed to using a web site hosting service that usually runs Apache httpd (or something like it) that simply serves your files, this won't work anymore. You now need your hosting service to run your web toolkit httpd application!

That's a really simple view of things. In reality, it may be common to have an Apache httpd (or some other application) receiving requests and forwarding the requests to your web toolkit application. Either way, you'll need a hosting provider that is willing to run your web toolkit application.

Thank you for clarifying. I have decided to attempt global Wt deployment on a home server. It seems that the most popular deployment options are "FastCGI on Apache" and "ISAPI on Microsoft IIS". I will be hosting my server on a Windows 10 computer. Are both deployment options doable with Windows 10 or just the latter option? Am I required to use a Linux distribution? Which one do you suggest I go for to keep it simple?

Thank you for clarifying. I have decided to attempt global Wt deployment on a home server. It seems that the most popular deployment options are "FastCGI on Apache" and "ISAPI on Microsoft IIS". I will be hosting my server on a Windows 10 computer. Are both deployment options doable with Windows 10 or just the latter option? Am I required to use a Linux distribution? Which one do you suggest I go for to keep it simple?

Hey,

FastCGI is not supported on windows.

ISAPI is possible. The alternative is to configure IIS as reverse proxy for Wt running with the built-in httpd.

Best regards,

Wim.

FastCGI is not supported on windows.

Well, it actually is .

I am not sure whether Wim intended \" Wt doesn't support fastcgi mode under windows \", though.

Vincenzo: I think that was what he wanted to say, yes. You can use FastCGI on Windows but not with Wt, because Wt uses UNIX-specific functions in its implementation.

Anonymous: How did you conclude that FastCGI and ISAPI are the most popular options? Because I would like to nip that in the bud. I see that Vincenzo linked you to the Wt 3 library overview. I had already updated the Wt 4 library overview, putting libwthttp first: https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt/doc/reference/html/overview.html#wthttpd

You can use ISAPI with IIS on Windows, but I find it to be a bit headache-inducing. In my opinion, you'd achieve more or less the same effect by banging your head into the wall for a couple of minutes.

When you're uploading HTML, JavaScript and CSS to some shared web hosting service, you're leaving the server administration up to them. They'll make sure there's some HTTP server running. With frameworks like Wt you're expected to manage the server yourself.

There are ways to start an arbitrary executable as a service on Windows if you want it to keep running in the background and start up at boot. The easiest way to do that is to use a service wrapper. This one seems fairly popular: https://github.com/kohsuke/winsw

Regards,

Roel