[racket-dev] Removing Xexpr preference from Web Server

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:39 AM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I've just added response/port for this purpose, although it only
> provides the ability to stream the content, the headers must be
> produced beforehand. Is that a game breaker?


Having response/port is great.  In the future it would also be great to
expose the input & output port to the servlet.


> I very much agree; I wonder if the single 'make-xexpr-response' will
> be too much overhead.
>

It won't be just a single make-xexpr-response at the entry point, if the
idea is to push the construction of the type of responses into the servlet,
unless the servlet only deals with a single type of response.

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com>
 wrote:

> I would like to remove the implicit preference the Web Server gives to
> Xexprs and the old esoteric bytes response format. This is backwards
> incompatible change, but I think it will make the server better in the
> long run as it will promote other HTML encodings, like the xml and
> html modules, Eli's new system, SXML, etc. I am interested in your
> opinion.
>

I agree with Neil that xexpr or sxml are very nice representations of html
as well.  Given their inherent advantage I think an extensible response
mechanism might work better:

   1. create hooks to handle different response types
   2. let the different package to install the necessary hooks

For example - the hook might be called make-response-hook, and in xml
package (maybe xml/web-server.ss) can install the hook.

Such a hook will allow others to make their own extension as well to manage
their own custom response types.

My 2 cents.  Cheers,
yc
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