Issue
139 February 2002
eZ
Embedded Web
by
Tom Cantrell
Cut
the Fat
The
Zilog demo page, taking full advantage of the spacious
memory, shows off many of the advanced capabilities of
the board and software: dynamic web pages, CGI, Java,
HTML, GET, POST, and so on. The point is that this isn’t
some emasculated hack of a stack. It will pretty much
take anything a top-tier web page design program can throw
at it. The only guidelines are to build your web site
in a flat directory (all files in one directory) and perhaps
use one of the widely available HTML optimizer packages
to strip out comments and other unnecessary stuff from
the resulting web files.
However,
being somewhat of a ’Net newbie, I thought it would be
helpful to come up with the simplest possible example.
Time for a Hello World program, or in this case, web site
(see Photo 3).
|
|
Photo
3—With high-level network API functions in hand, an
embedded web page is only a few lines of C code away. |
As
you can see in the photo, the program (hellomain.c) is
actually quite simple. A web site is simply defined as
a collection of HTML pages and objects such as a .gif
or .jpeg. When you add a web file (specifically, *.html,
*.gif, *.jpeg, *.class, or *.wav) to your project, ZDS
automatically converts it to a C equivalent and includes
it with the rest of your source files.
When
all was said and done, my Hello World application ended
up consuming about 150 KB versus nearly 500 KB for the
Zilog demo page. The difference was the Hello World web
site was about 250 KB smaller than the demo page and I
also managed to strip out another 100 KB of optional includes
such as the operating system console shell.
Even
my downsized version didn’t go all the way. If you really
get into it, you can squeeze even more in the way of unneeded
protocols and features out of the stack. You can, but
the point is you don’t have to. If you want all the bells
and whistles and have the memory to spare, feel free to
go for the gusto.
