Rasp! is a co-operative programming combination of data exchange between software running on the Arcade BBS StrongARM Acorn Risc PC. The Acorn RISC OS operating system allows great flexibility and ease of programming in many languages, so that unrelated applications can easily communicate with each other to produce new functions.
Rasp! begins as a CGI script written in BASIC, running on the AlphaNet© Internet Servers software package. Its HTTP Web server collects the search key text from the web site visitor, and while running as a CGI Wimp task, passes this text on to a specially written 'helper' program called !WebSearch© based on a utility supplied with the ARCbbs© bulletin board software.
!WebSearch© has access to a text file containing details of all the filenames, their lengths and short descriptions. This file is generated automatically every weekend by the BBS software in response to a cron task scheduler that is part of the BBS time management facilities.
!WebSearch© generates a list of file details that contain matches to the submitted key, and sends this list back to AlphaNet©. The Rasp! CGI script has been patiently waiting in a multi-tasking poll loop for the arrival of the results file, which is signalled by the reception of a Wimp message from the Task manager to say that !WebSearch© has finished processing.
The Rasp! CGI script examines the results file and on-the-fly generates the HTML to form the file search results listing page, adding the hot link FTP server paths which are calculated from the hierarchical file number, enabling the web site visitor to rapidly access the files that have been found.
© Arcade BBS February 1997
Acorn, RISC OS, and RISC PC are trademarks of Acorn Computers
All other trademarks and copyrights are acknowledged
![[Arcade BBS Imagemap Selector]](/gifs/select.gif)