Quick Update on Deal

Deal proceeds apace.

I've spent the past while putting together a minimal, single-threaded asynchronous server to simplify the deployment process. Almost done, and you can see the progress on this branch in this subdirectory. The remaining stuff left ToDo is:

Better Errors. I need to put together an appropriate assertion mechanism. Straight up assert works fine in a multi-threaded context, but does some mean things when you've only got the one thread. Normally, it wouldn't be that big a deal, but I have to special-case my handler-case statements for SIMPLE-ERROR in order to allow shell interruption. Unfortunately, they're both conditions of type simple-error, which means that if I do it naively, I either let both or neither through. What I'm planning to do is define a macro named something like http-assert, which will throw a type of error I can then safely convert into an HTTP-400 response.

Basic Static Files. Currently, I'm serving static files through nginx only. Which is the efficient way of doing it. However, one use-case I'm thinking of for Deal is that of a small, geographically disparate team setting up a private server for themselves. It's kind of a pain in the ass to have to set up a reverse proxy for that situation, so it would be nice if House provided a basic file handler for people to use.

That's ... going to get complicated though. A first crack at the implementation is here and here. That only works for text files so far[1], and it only works for a laughably small number of mimetypes. A more complete map can be found here or here, but I'm not going to be anywhere near as thorough; remember, this is an edge case. This lightweight server is not in the business of serving out static files in an efficient manner. That's what things like nginx are for, and I've got no doubt they're doing a better job than I could.

Touch Ups Sessions don't expire yet. And when they do, I'll want to give them the same kind of behavior hooks that I've got going for new-session. There's also the non-trivial matter of porting the rest of the Deal system to work better with the House server, but I get the feeling I'm most of the way there already.

Famous last words, right?

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Footnotes

1 - [back] - I'm still trying to iron out kinks; in particular there seems to be some kind of character encoding issue left in the way that I just can't get my head around. I'll be asking on SO shortly.