Note on why the programs should run on the server side
The solution of running the programs on the client machines
with a regular symbolic debugger was not considered, as it
would be highly non-portable. Indeed, it would imply using a
specialized MIME type, with a dedicated viewer that had to be
loaded on the client machine to make the remote execution possible.
Only those people having this special MIME type defined and a
version of the dedicated viewer that could run on their machine,
would be able to run the program animation.
In addition, since there is no way for the hhtp server to know
the architecture of the client machine, we would have had to
add an additional document, when an example program is first
activated, to allow the user to specify the kind of machine
the program would be executing on.
It was therefore decided that the Pascal programs would run
on the server side, be it on the same machine as the http
daemon or on another machine, through a remote procedure call.
This is a section of a copy of the paper
World-Wide algorithm animation
by
Bertrand Ibrahim,
Computer Science Department, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
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