nick rothwell | project cassiel

An installation piece I'm working on requires an embedded web server, 

so I thought I'd go ahead and wrap up Jetty inside MXJ and release 

the thing as a package under the LGPL, just in case anyone else finds 

it useful to run a web server over bits of MaxMSP's search path. You 

http://www.loadbang.net/space/Software/net.loadbang.web

Instructions, javadocs, examples and sources included. I'm planning 

to announce it to the general MaxMSP list soon, but thought I'd let 

people on the developer list give it a bit of a bashing first. I've 

run it on OS X and Windows and it seems pretty happy.

An installation piece I'm working on requires an embedded web server,  
so I thought I'd go ahead and wrap up Jetty inside MXJ and release  
the thing as a package under the LGPL, just in case anyone else finds  
it useful to run a web server over bits of MaxMSP's search path. You  
can find it here:

	http://www.loadbang.net/space/Software/net.loadbang.web

Instructions, javadocs, examples and sources included. I'm planning  
to announce it to the general MaxMSP list soon, but thought I'd let  
people on the developer list give it a bit of a bashing first. I've  
run it on OS X and Windows and it seems pretty happy.

Nick Rothwell / Cassiel.com Limited
www.cassiel.com
www.myspace.com/cassieldotcom
www.last.fm/music/cassiel
www.reverbnation.com/cassiel
www.linkedin.com/in/cassiel
www.loadbang.net


announce-embedded-web-server-for-maxmsp-beta

Nice! Thanks Nick, this is great. I had been meaning to try this for a while but never got around to it.

One thing I've wanted to do was to control Max patches from the web. I think using the URL query string would be a good way to do this, but your object doesn't expose that to the patch. So I made a few adjustments...

* In net.loadbang.web.WebServer I added the following code to the top of ReporterHandler.handle() (sorry for the forum messing up my code formatting):

Enumeration params = request.getParameterNames();

            while (params.hasMoreElements()) {

                String param = (String) params.nextElement();

                String[] vals = request.getParameterValues(param);

                if (vals == null) {

                    itsOutputter.output(3, param);

                    StringBuffer s = new StringBuffer(param);

                    for (int i = 0; i < vals.length; i++) {

                        s.append(" ").append(vals[i]);

                    }

                    itsOutputter.output(3, s.toString());

            // or something like this:

            // itsOutputter.output(3, request.getQueryString());

            // but I don't feel like doing query string parsing in Max

Then, as a really simple example, you could serve up the following HTML:

If that seems useful to you, might be worth including in your external. It wouldn't take much effort to do something more interactive like using AJAX to update the Max patch on-the-fly (I think there was something like that in the aka.iphone experiements).

It would also be cool to enable JSP support. This could be used to allow the Max patch to communicate back to the browser. I'm not exactly sure how you do that with an embedded Jetty server. I might look into that some other time (unless you already know how?)

BTW, I was not able to use your build.xml file:

/Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml could not be found

java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml (No such file or directory)

Nice! Thanks Nick, this is great. I had been meaning to try this for a while but never got around to it. 

* In net.loadbang.web.mxj.WebServer
I increased the number of outlets.
declareIO(1, 4);

Enumeration params = request.getParameterNames();
			while (params.hasMoreElements()) {
				String param = (String) params.nextElement();
				String[] vals = request.getParameterValues(param);
				if (vals == null) {
					itsOutputter.output(3, param);
				}
				else {
					StringBuffer s = new StringBuffer(param);
					for (int i = 0; i < vals.length; i++) {
						s.append(" ").append(vals[i]);
					}
					itsOutputter.output(3, s.toString());
				}
			}
			// or something like this:
			// itsOutputter.output(3, request.getQueryString());
			// but I don't feel like doing query string parsing in Max

Then, as a really simple example, you could serve up the following HTML: 

If that seems useful to you, might be worth including in your external. It wouldn't take much effort to do something more interactive like using AJAX to update the Max patch on-the-fly (I think there was something like that in the aka.iphone experiements). 

BTW, I was not able to use your build.xml file:
$ ant  
Buildfile: build.xml
/Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml could not be found

BUILD FAILED
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml (No such file or directory)

                        itsOutputter.output(3, param + " " + vals[i]);

Enumeration params = request.getParameterNames();
			while (params.hasMoreElements()) {
				String param = (String) params.nextElement();
				String[] vals = request.getParameterValues(param);
				if (vals == null) {
					itsOutputter.output(3, param);
				}
				else {
					for (int i = 0; i < vals.length; i++) {
						itsOutputter.output(3, param + " " + vals[i]);
					}
				}
			}

I got JSPs to work. Just needed to add the jars from Jetty's lib/jsp directory (I used jsp-2.1), and then add the following handler in the handlers.setHandlers() call:

new WebAppContext(directory.toURL().toString(), "/")

This seems to break the DefaultHandler's behavior for favicon though (who cares?)

I also have some other changes that let me send messages like "set attrName attrValue" to the WebServer object in Max, and then I can access the value in the JSP with the ${attrName} syntax. So 2-way communication between the web browser and the Max patch is easily possible. Let me know if you would like to see the code.

I had been playing around with the servlet support, and had thought 

about having the MXJ object call out into Max, but hadn't thought 

about JSP support. Thanks for all the effort. If you're happy with 

it, I'll integrate your enhancements into the main release (credited, 

nick rothwell -- composition, systems, performance -- 

I had been playing around with the servlet support, and had thought  
about having the MXJ object call out into Max, but hadn't thought  
about JSP support. Thanks for all the effort. If you're happy with  
it, I'll integrate your enhancements into the main release (credited,  
natch).

   nick rothwell -- composition, systems, performance -- http:// 
www.cassiel.com


> BTW, I was not able to use your build.xml file:

> /Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml could 

Oh yeah, sorry about that: the various references between the Ant 

files (and for that matter, the class paths) are dependent on the way 

I've laid out my Eclipse projects, and it'll take a bit of effort to 

get that into a form which can be used by anyone else. Well done on 

> BTW, I was not able to use your build.xml file:
> $ ant
> Buildfile: build.xml
> /Users/adam/workspace/net.loadbang.web/MXJ-basis/ant-defs.xml could  
> not be found

Oh yeah, sorry about that: the various references between the Ant  
files (and for that matter, the class paths) are dependent on the way  
I've laid out my Eclipse projects, and it'll take a bit of effort to  
get that into a form which can be used by anyone else. Well done on  
getting it all into the air regardless.

Announce: embedded web server for MaxMSP (beta)