📬 HTTP Content Delivery Demo 📬

A demo of server content delivery enabling users to select HTTP response headers for themselves.

Primary purpose is to observe the effect of different HTTP response headers in various browsers after discovering quite wildly different behaviours in Internet Explorer vs. Chrome when delivering binary content 'inline'. This approximates the delivery of files from the Rosetta Long Term Preservation system v4.0.1 at least.

To run

Set the file modification dates

The content server should deliver files with dates older than $TODAY. We can achieve that using the touch command. More info here.

There is a small script included in this demo which will set all the dates for the sample files to 1970-01-01:

#! /usr/bin/bash

set -eux

echo "setting time and date on files"
 $(TZ=UTC touch -a -m -t 197001010000.01 file1.tga)
 $(TZ=UTC touch -a -m -t 197001010000.01 file2.rtf)
 $(TZ=UTC touch -a -m -t 197001010000.01 file3.txt)
 $(TZ=UTC touch -a -m -t 197001010000.01 file4.ppp)
 $(TZ=UTC touch -a -m -t 197001010000.01 file5.ai)
echo "done"

Run ./touch-all.sh which already includes these commands. If you need to set the script's permissions, simply: chmod +x touch-all.sh.

Building and running the server

A simple golang app can be built and run with the commands below:

$go build
$http-content-delivery-demo

You should see output such as:

2023/11/02 21:40:47 Server listening on port 2040.

Access the site in a web-browser with: http://127.0.0.1:2040

Content

Content here is either licensed under Archives New Zealand Catalogue terms, or provided as fair use for the purpose of archival research.

Content-disposition: Archival

This small app is also in support of the blog: Content-disposition: Archival – Repatriating Dates on Access to Born-digital Records Online on the OPF website.

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Ross Spencer

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.