mmo-project/fortran/www

fortran-µhttpd (game website & webserver)

Fortran does not have any native way to connect to the internet. It cannot even create sockets of any kind.

This makes it an absolute nightmare to create a web server since you need to import sockets and tcp libraries from C, using the using the use iso_c_binding feature.

However, in the spirit of the challenge, I wanted to not have to resort to importing functions from another programming language as much as possible. Later when I create the client I would have to import libraries from C, but for this I could try and use "Fortran Only".

While reading this old Fortran google groups question from 2009 the group suggested that the user just use netcat and serve the Fortran program as if it were a cgi script.

This was a great idea because instead of needing to mess around with networking and making sure the functions and types imported corretly from C, I could just read and write to standard in/out and to files.

The downside of using netcat is that it uses unidirectional sockets. You would have to create a named pipe and do a bunch of redrieting to get it to work.

mkfifo ncpipe
nc -l 8080 0<ncpipe | ./fortran-µhttpd '../../common/html/index.html' 1>ncpipe

It just doesnt seem all that clean to me. Additionally, it refused to stay open after running one message from the web client, so I gave up on that approach.

Somthing that does work and be a lot cleaner is listen1 from plan9port. This allows for the web browser to connect to the programs stdin, stdout, & stderr, and the program can read and write as a normal command line program.

listen1 'tcp!*!8080' ./fortran-µhttpd

I next implemented the post handling. In www.f90, it checks to see if the header returning from the

I found a library to interface with the sqlite library I will store the username, password, and other information about.

The issue is that fortran does not have a built in cryptographic hash library nor is it in the stdlib, I did find a implementation of the SM3 hash which is cryptographically sound, and have used that.

If this were to be used in the real world I would prefer to use bcrypt as it is the most common password hashing algorithm.

The implementation does not work well with existing systems since you have to convert from fortran strings to c strings and it returns an integer array of c strings which has to be converted back into fortran strings.

This is a horrible implementation from a security POV, since there is no easy way to sanitize the input, fortran certainly doesn't do that out of the box.