First Steps

To follow along, you need to first do one of the following

• If you are on Windows, you can simply download and run the self-contained BowWow executable. No other software (web server, a Tcl installation etc.) is needed. This is the quickest way to try out Woof! and the application can be easily moved later to a different web server with no changes.
• On all platforms, you can download and extract a Woof! distribution and run the bowwow script. A Tcl 8.6 shell must have been previously installed on your system. This script runs a simple web server, BowWow, that can be used for trying out Woof!. Note that there is no need to run the installer script to use the bowwow.tcl script.
• A third alternative is to install a suitable web server, Tcl 8.6 and Woof! as described in the Installation chapter. This provides a production environment but entails a few more steps for installation including running the installer script.

In all cases, remember to follow the installation verification steps to ensure Woof! and the web server are installed and configured correctly.

Although the application code runs unchanged between various web servers, the commands for invoking various Woof! utilities, such as stub generation, differs between the single-executable BowWow and the other configurations. In the former case, because the BowWow executable is entirely self-contained, it is used to invoke various commands. For example,

c:\fibo> bowwow url fibonacci/generate fibonacci/help

On the other hand, for the other configurations, including use of the bowwow script, the Tcl shell program has to be run for the same purpose, with an appropriate script. For example,

~/fibo> tclsh scripts/wag.tcl url fibonacci/generate fibonacci/help

Here it is assumed the command is run from the Woof! root directory ~/fibo. Both forms of the commands are shown in this guide.

The URL's used in the examples assume you are running the web server on port 8015 (which is the default BowWow port) and the Woof! application URL root is /. If not, you will need to modify the example URL's appropriately.