[Haskell-cafe] [web-devel] Looking for criticism and comments on web-mongrel2.

[Clint Moore]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 5:44 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> Glad to hear you were already working on the bytestring switch, I hope
> I didn't focus on that too much ;). If you *are* planning on writing a

Naw, you didn't.  Using bytestrings as much as possible especially
when dealing with network services are a definite best practice.

> WAI handler for this, you will need to provide something more powerful
> for the response body than lazy bytestrings. Well, either that, or use
> some ugly forkIO/unsafeInterleaveIO tricks that I don't mention in
> polite company.

Well, then I'll have to figure something out.  I'm morally opposed to unsafe*

No, forkIO I love.  But haven't yet had to resort to using anything
unsafe, though I haven't done any FFI or other things that apparently
make it necessary.

> Out of curiosity, does mongrel2 provide any kind of optimization for
> serving files via a sendfile system call? I would be surprised if it
> didn't.

I don't know.  I'll check that out and report back.

As far as handling files, one thing that I really like about M2 is the
way it handles file uploads.  From the manual:

"Mongrel2 uses an asynchronous method of doing uploads that helps you
avoid receiving files you either can't accept or shouldn't accept. It
does this by sending your handler an initial message with just the
headers, streaming the file to disk, and then a final message so you
can read the resulting file. If you don't want the upload, then you
can send a kill message (a 0 length message) and the connection
closes, and the file never lands."

I'm going to write a couple of simple examples later today, one of
them being a file upload handler to illustrate how to use it from the
application side.