By kcully Published on October 30, 2006

My Sad REALbasic CGI Story

I had a few minutes to play and I wanted to see if I could get a REALbasic CGI application running. I opened up RB on Windows, and opened up a RB Project file (cgiapp.rbp) that I had pulled from the web. I made a small change to their "Hello World" application, built for Linux. I copied it then into CGI directory of my Linux laptop, and ... it worked!!! {Happy Dance!}

Rocking! Amazing. Amazing that a guy of my limited intelligence could get this working.

Hmmm. Can I get this to work on my hosting account at HostMySite.com? I FTPd the files up into my CGI directory and ... 500 error. Dang. I checked the execution settings via CHMOD. Nothing there. I called the normally excellent HostMySite technical support and they said they would look into it. I received an email back saying that the application was looking for libstdc++.so.5 and that I should include this in my application.

Well, I searched around on the web and the RB forums but this seemed to be a problem that has more or less resolved itself in mid 2005, but not at my hosting site. I copied this file up to the CGI directory and the TMP directory hoping that the application would just find it and run with it. Unfortunately not.

I called back and asked if they would install libstdc++.so.5 on the server for me. They said that they would pass this onto their server team and let me know their decision shortly.

I finally heard back from them this morning. Here's their response:

We took a look at the complied executable that you are trying to run on your server and unfortunately that will not be able to be run in a shared environment because it requires the gcc libraries that are installed with gcc. Unfortunately for security purposes we cannot install gcc on a shared server and allow executables to run.

If you would like to be able to run executables on your server and though apache we recommend a VPS plan. A VPS is your own virtual server where you have root access. The hardware is shared between vpses that are fully isolated from each other.

Dang. Their VPS plans are $30 a month, more or less. I was really hoping that RB would run on the servers with a $8 per month plan. Yes, I'm cheap. I guess I need to post into the RB forums and I'm a bit disappointed considering how easy it was to get running on my own Linux laptop. Stay tuned!