[plt-scheme] Building a proxy in plt-scheme

Just a side note, you might want to look at Google Desktop,
http://desktop.google.com , which searches (and caches) webpages you
viewed in the past, and files on your computer.


ifconfig.


On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 01:25:14 -0400, Neil W. Van Dyke
<neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> 
> Thomas-Xavier MARTIN <txm at m4x.org> writes at 10:05 19-Oct-2004 +0200:
> > I would be grateful for any advice or suggestions on how to
> > architecture such a project in PLT-Scheme, which libraries and tools I
> > should look at, etc.
> 
> One of the practical considerations with HTTP proxies is that they
> absolutely have to work (not crash, not hang, not slow things down, not
> leak memory) or they quickly become intolerable to the user.  I first
> found this when using a Java-based HTTP proxy framework, Muffin, which
> (at least in 1997) had unacceptably imperfect reliability.  The bugs
> made me stop using my own little tool, which was otherwise very useful
> (keyword searches on content of Web pages you'd seen at some specified
> point in the past).
> 
> If I were going to do this as a logging-only proxy in pure PLT Scheme
> without using any C, I would expect to spend more development time on
> efficient I/O buffers than on the HTTP protocol handling, since fast I/O
> is important and HTTP passthrough is easy.  As I passed HTTP traffic
> through with minimal rewriting, I'd log it into a fast SQL database as
> large text fields and blobs.  Perhaps separate tables for each of
> Request, ResponseHeaders, ResponseBody (with a one-to-many relation
> between ResponseHeader and ResponseBody that can be established as a
> background task that just does a byte-for-byte comparison of
> ResponseBody blobs ).  Note that ResponseBody blobs won't always contain
> the entire requested object.  I would probably do any necessary assembly
> of multiple ResponseBody blobs at the time they're needed by an
> application, not try to do this while logging.
> 
> (This was actually very much on my TODO list for once I found funding
> for my Internet HCI research.  But alas, it looks like the funding
> situation that I'm currently pursuing mandates Java.)
> 
> I think you could also try using Apache in proxy mode, having it call
> your Scheme code.  Offhand, I don't know the details of how to do this
> in the current versions of Apache.
> 
> --
>                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/
>