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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:

• Server 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 <; & must be &, 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.)

• https://docs.rs/crate/idna_adapter/latest seems relevant.

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