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Legacy applications through Tardigrade broker
This document will provide all steps showing how to use Brook Tardigrade to run legacy applications based in Brook for Free Pascal. In general, such applications depend on external web server and run through CGI or FastCGI. Since Brook Tardigrade provides a high-performance secure HTTP web server, it can be embedded into any VCL/FMX/LCL/console application and used as a good replacement for Apache, Nginx, IIS, Lighttpd, Mongoose, fphttpserver and so on. There are many advantages in using Tardigrade, like better performance, easy debugging, few (or any) configuration, no special permissions to handle register or kernel mode driver like http.sys, distribution of a single GNU library about 140 kB instead of distributing an entire setup or many files of a full web HTTP server.
Sagui library is the heart of all this. It has built libraries (DLLs) for Windows 32/64 and can be easily built for other Unix based systems.
For Windows, download the packagelibsagui-3.4.0-dll.zip from this page, choose the version x86 (32 bits) or x86_64 (64 bits) and unpack it into your application directory.
For Ubuntu/Debian download and install
# Install required tools.
sudo apt update # For Debian usually: aptitude update
sudo apt install clang cmake # For Debian it can: aptitude install clang cmake
# sometimes needs to install make
sudo apt-get install make
# Download latest release
wget --continue --content-disposition https://github.com/risoflora/libsagui/archive/v3.4.0.tar.gz
tar -zxvf libsagui-3.4.0.tar.gz
# Create temporary directories to build the library
cd libsagui-3.4.0/ && mkdir build && cd build/
# Configure, build and install.
# prepare the build scripts (please use the build summary to check if the build is OK for your system)
cmake -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON ..
# build / install the binary
make && sudo make sagui install/strip # For Debian: make && make sagui install/strip
# update the LD cache on your system
sudo ldconfig # For Debian just ldconfig
For other systems, follow these steps to build the library from scratch.
Note: there is a 'Needs packaging' entry on Launchpad to make Sagui library available on APT in next Ubuntu releases.
Currently, Brook Tardigrade is in beta version and can be downloaded here. After downloading it, unpack and install the package BrookTardigrade.dpk for Delphi or BrookTardigrade.lpk for Lazarus. Optionally, you can test its examples just copying the Sagui library into the Examples directory.
Probably, some version of Brook will already be installed in your Lazarus IDE. Otherwise, supposing your application depends on Brook 4, this version can be downloaded here and installed via its .lpk packages. After that, got to your Brookers.pas unit and replace any already existing broker like brookfclcgibroker.pas, brookfclfcgibroker.pas, brookfclhttpappbroker.pas etc. by the Tardigrade/brooktardigradebroker.pas.
Also it must to add the new line Application.Initialize; (if it is not) before BrookApp.Run; //(or Application.Run) to the legacy code of Your lazarus project (.lpr).
Now, just run your application and voilà, welcome to the Brook Tardigrade!
If you have any doubts about the steps above and would like to test it in a already existing application, we provided the smallest example showing it in practice, and you can get it here.