Re: [Freecats-Dev] Now, about our HTTP server...

[David N. Welton]

Henri Chorand <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm thinking about such a setup for the interface part of the
> server. Dave being, apart from Apache Tcl's David Welton, the
> highest-ranking Tcl officer on this list...

> So I thought we could design our server as follows:

> 1) Micro-HTTP server in Tcl (probably works as a loop), receives
> requests sent to the server, makes calls to subroutines and returns
> answers. In fact, I found somewhere that a micro-server was written
> with around 250 lines of Tcl code, I believe it's worth a look.
> So, this module would handle access (authentication to be further
> defined, preferrably something already written & well documented).

Do you really need or want an HTTP server, when all it's going to do
is call some other commands?  I'm not sure that an http server should
be used except as a frontend, much like it can act as a front end for
an SQL server.

> 2) A set of subroutines (all our API functions).

> This is something where I seriously lack background info: it seems
> to me that some tasks may be run in asynchronous mode, like context
> search queries (any read-only TM access), user/admin connection
> management...

> But should not the TM update tasks run in synchronous mode (one
> query at a time with a single process managing everything that's
> happening in terms of update)?  Unless the above is not "proper
> HTTP", to use a simple term, and we should use "well" written
> routines so as to also work in asynchronous mode.

> Could anybody provide a basic explanation of how a HTTP server
> works?

Request comes in:

GET /some/file.html HTTP/1.0
headers...

Resource requested goes out:
...

It's pretty simple.

As for the internals.... depends on the server, and very much so.

-- 
David N. Welton
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