Breaking changes with previous commit. This is a very large change,
and I am giving up on making a single commit that fixes everything.
More commits will follow slowly adding back features, introducing
new tests and fixing the documentation.
This change contains most of the work toward unifying the interface
for handling both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. HTTP/1.1 connections are now
no longer 1 process per connection; instead by default 1 process per
request is also created. This has a number of pros and cons.
Because it has cons, we also allow users to use a lower-level API
that acts on "streams" (requests/responses) directly at the connection
process-level. If performance is a concern, one can always write a
stream handler. The performance in this case will be even greater
than with Cowboy 1, although all the special handlers are unavailable.
When switching to Websocket, after the handler returns from init/2,
Cowboy stops the stream and the Websocket protocol takes over the
connection process. Websocket then calls websocket_init/2 for any
additional initialization such as timers, because the process is
different in init/2 and websocket_*/* functions. This however would
allow us to use websocket_init/2 for sending messages on connect,
instead of sending ourselves a message and be subject to races.
Note that websocket_init/2 is optional.
This is all a big change and while most of the tests pass, some
functionality currently doesn't. SPDY is broken and will be removed
soon in favor of HTTP/2. Automatic compression is currently disabled.
The cowboy_req interface probably still have a few functions that
need to be updated. The docs and examples do not refer the current
functionality anymore.
Everything will be fixed over time. Feedback is more than welcome.
Open a ticket!
This change simplifies a little more the sub protocols mechanism.
Aliases have been removed. The renaming of loop handlers as long
polling handlers has been reverted.
Plain HTTP handlers now simply do their work in the init/2
callback. There is no specific code for them.
Loop handlers now follow the same return value as Websocket,
they use ok to continue and shutdown to stop.
Terminate reasons for all handler types have been documented.
The terminate callback is now appropriately called in all cases
(or should be).
Behaviors for all handler types have been moved in the module
that implement them. This means that cowboy_handler replaces
the cowboy_http_handler behavior, and similarly cowboy_loop
replaces cowboy_loop_handler, cowboy_websocket replaces
cowboy_websocket_handler. Finally cowboy_rest now has the
start of a behavior in it and will have the full list of
optional callbacks defined once Erlang 18.0 gets released.
The guide has been reorganized and should be easier to follow.
This set of changes is the first step to simplify the
writing of handlers, by removing some extraneous
callbacks and making others optional.
init/3 is now init/2, its first argument being removed.
rest_init/2 and rest_terminate/2 have been removed.
websocket_init/3 and websocket_terminate/3 have been removed.
terminate/3 is now optional. It is called regardless of
the type of handler, including rest and websocket.
The return value of init/2 changed. It now returns
{Mod, Req, Opts} with Mod being either one of the four
handler type or a custom module. It can also return extra
timeout and hibernate options.
The signature for sub protocols has changed, they now
receive these extra timeout and hibernate options.
Loop handlers are now implemented in cowboy_long_polling,
and will be renamed throughout the project in a future commit.
Simplify the interface for most cowboy_req functions. They all return
a single value except the four body reading functions. The reply functions
now only return a Req value.
Access functions do not return a Req anymore.
Functions that used to cache results do not have a cache anymore.
The interface for accessing query string and cookies has therefore
been changed.
There are now three query string functions: qs/1 provides access
to the raw query string value; parse_qs/1 returns the query string
as a list of key/values; match_qs/2 returns a map containing the
values requested in the second argument, after applying constraints
and default value.
Similarly, there are two cookie functions: parse_cookies/1 and
match_cookies/2. More match functions will be added in future commits.
None of the functions return an error tuple anymore. It either works
or crashes. Cowboy will attempt to provide an appropriate status code
in the response of crashed handlers.
As a result, the content decode function has its return value changed
to a simple binary, and the body reading functions only return on success.
Changes include:
* Much simplified route configuration.
* Etag generation is now enabled by default.
* Web mimetypes are now detected by default. A bigger list of
mimetypes can be detected without any additional library.
* Mimetypes can no longer be specified as a list. Copying this
list for new connections is too costy. You can easily convert
it into a function and pass that function to the handler instead.
* You can however specify a single hardcoded mimetype. Mostly
useful when serving a single file, like an index.html file,
to avoid extra operations.
* Specifying a path as a list of tokens is not possible anymore.
Use either a binary or a string.
* Using a private directory will not work if the application
was not started properly. Cowboy will not attempt to find
the location of this directory if the VM doesn't know it,
as this caused issues in some setups.
* Overall the code has been much simplified and clarified,
and of course has now been documented.
