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Alistair Turnbull edited this page Jul 2, 2026 · 15 revisions

This page can be used for hacking the design/spec together until it can be moved to a .md file in the repo

petite_http desiderata/spec

Features:

  • Serves arbitrary text and binary content types.
  • HTTP redirects.
  • A system that prevents escaping errors in the request.
  • A system that prevents escaping errors in the response.
  • Rust's ? operator generates HTTP error responses.
  • You never see a Url.
  • Useful utilities for manipulating and testing parts of URL paths.
  • cargo run --example demo.
  • Serving pages with radically different request parameters, deserving of different Params types.
  • handle_post().

Informal criterion is "anything needed by Ocularity, photo server, Nifki, questionnaire, congenialwiki". It's far from a feature-complete web app framework, as it should be. Just the 80% functionality.

Handle/dispatch

Serving pages with radically different request parameters, deserving of different Params types. For this, I think a possible design is a dispatch() function that picks a Handle implementation and passes it to a callback. Then different URL paths can have different Params types, and each be statically type checked.

Templating

We provide a templating system sufficient to prevent escaping errors in the response. < must be &lt;; & must be &amp;, and so on. Additionally, any URLs included in HTML attributes must be %-encoded and then HTML-encoded.

Escaping bugs are the most common bugs after memory allocation. At least, that was true a few years ago; memory allocation has got a lot better since.

Libraries exist for all the encoding steps. Our job is to make correct usage obvious and convenient.

For this the minimum viable product is a trait Escape with common implementations. the payload of HttpOkay:Html is a Box<dyn Escape>, i.e. the handler can return an Escape, and petite_http will escape it correctly. To bypass the escaping engine, use HttpOkay::Text instead.

Dependencies policy

let's not go down the npm route of oneliner dependencies; but equally, let's continue to use url::Url which appears to have already gone down that route... (I looked for viable alternatives and there aren't any.)

Development

  • Have a think about how you want to do testing and publishing to crates.io.
  • We should probably have an example web app that you can cargo run in the petite_http crate.
  • yeah it should be done properly; i mean we can get it working for our use cases, but committing to a good v1.0 down the line

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