[racket] How does the web server find servlets?

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Doug Orleans <dougorleans at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wanted to know how the Racket web server figures out whether a URL refers
> to a servlet or not.  In particular, I was curious about how the
> "servlet-root" path in the configuration table was used (its default is
> ".").  The closest thing I could find to documentation was this bullet point
> in the docs for "web-server@":
>     Execute servlets in the mapping URLs to the given servlet root directory
> under htdocs.
> I've read this sentence many times and I still can't parse it...  Is there a
> word or two missing or something?

Ya, I'll fix it

> Anyway, after digging through the source code (particularly
> web-server-unit.rkt), here's my understanding:  If
> [host-root]/[file-root]/[servlet-root]/[url-path] refers to an existing file
> whose extension is ".ss", ".scm", ".rkt", or ".rktd", then the file is
> loaded and served as a servlet.  (It's actually a bit more complicated,
> since it handles extra path elements after the servlet name.)  For example,
> if host-root is ".", file-root is "htdocs", servlet-root is "servlets", and
> url-path is "foo.rkt", then if "./htdocs/servlets/foo.rkt" exists, it is
> served as a servlet, otherwise if "./htdocs/foo.rkt" exists, it is served as
> a file.
> Is this right?  Can this be documented more clearly somewhere?  (Or is it
> already?)
> Anyway, is there a way to customize this (e.g. to be able to map directory
> URLs to servlets) without having to recreate the entire chain of dispatchers
> from web-server@ by hand?

You shouldn't use web-server at . You should use serve/servlet where
stuff like this is totally trivial.

Jay

> --Doug
>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93