wai-0.3.1: Web Application Interface.

Network.Wai

Contents

Description

This module defines a generic web application interface. It is a common protocol between web servers and web applications.

The overriding design principles here are performance and generality . To address performance, this library is built on top of the enumerator package. The advantages of this approach over lazy IO have been debated elsewhere. However, helper functions like responseLBS allow you to continue using lazy IO if you so desire.

Generality is achieved by removing many variables commonly found in similar projects that are not universal to all servers. The goal is that the Request object contains only data which is meaningful in all circumstances.

A final note: please remember when using this package that, while your application may compile without a hitch against many different servers, there are other considerations to be taken when moving to a new backend. For example, if you transfer from a CGI application to a FastCGI one, you might suddenly find you have a memory leak. Conversely, a FastCGI application would be well served to preload all templates from disk when first starting; this would kill the performance of a CGI application.

Synopsis

Data types

Request method

type Method = ByteStringSource

HTTP request method. Since the HTTP protocol allows arbitrary request methods, we leave this open as a ByteString. Please note the request methods are case-sensitive.

HTTP protocol versions

type HttpVersion = ByteStringSource

Version of HTTP protocol used in current request. The value given here should be everything following the "HTTP/" line in a request. In other words, HTTP/1.1 -> "1.1", HTTP/1.0 -> "1.0".

Case-insensitive byte strings

data CIByteString Source

A case insensitive bytestring, where the Eq and Ord instances do comparisons based on the lower-cased version of this string. For efficiency, this datatype contains both the original and lower-case version of the string; this means there is no need to lower-case the bytestring for every comparison.

Please note that this datatype has an IsString instance, which can allow for very concise code when using the OverloadedStrings language extension.

mkCIByteString :: ByteString -> CIByteStringSource

Convert a regular bytestring to a case-insensitive bytestring.

Request header names

type RequestHeader = CIByteStringSource

Headers sent from the client to the server. Note that this is a case-insensitive string, as the HTTP spec specifies.

Response header names

type ResponseHeader = CIByteStringSource

Headers sent from the server to the client. Note that this is a case-insensitive string, as the HTTP spec specifies.

Response status code

data Status Source

HTTP status code; a combination of the integral code and a status message. Equality is determined solely on the basis of the integral code.

Constructors

Status 

Instances

statusNotAllowed :: StatusSource

Method Not Allowed

statusServerError :: StatusSource

Internal Server Error

WAI interface

data Request Source

Information on the request sent by the client. This abstracts away the details of the underlying implementation.

Constructors

Request 

Fields

requestMethod :: Method
 
httpVersion :: HttpVersion
 
pathInfo :: ByteString

Extra path information sent by the client. The meaning varies slightly depending on backend; in a standalone server setting, this is most likely all information after the domain name. In a CGI application, this would be the information following the path to the CGI executable itself.

queryString :: ByteString

If no query string was specified, this should be empty.

serverName :: ByteString
 
serverPort :: Int
 
requestHeaders :: [(RequestHeader, ByteString)]

Was this request made over an SSL connection?

isSecure :: Bool

Log the given line in some method; how this is accomplished is server-dependant.

errorHandler :: String -> IO ()
 
remoteHost :: SockAddr

The client's host information.

Instances

type Middleware = Application -> ApplicationSource

Middleware is a component that sits between the server and application. It can do such tasks as GZIP encoding or response caching. What follows is the general definition of middleware, though a middleware author should feel free to modify this.

As an example of an alternate type for middleware, suppose you write a function to load up session information. The session information is simply a string map [(String, String)]. A logical type signatures for this middleware might be:

 loadSession :: ([(String, String)] -> Application) -> Application

Here, instead of taking a standard Application as its first argument, the middleware takes a function which consumes the session information as well.

Response body smart constructors