Added dynamic pages with dynamic linking during runtime
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documentation/dynamicpages.md
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documentation/dynamicpages.md
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# Part 1: The problem
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A static webpage is easy. Just tell swebs to read a few files given a few http paths and you're done. Dyanmic pages are harder. There are a few solutions, you could execute a program and return stdout (too slow), encourage each website to create their own forks of swebs and make it really easy to directly modify the source code to add a dynamic page (inelegant), write a php interpreter (bloated), execute a program the user creates and keep it running while the web server communicates with it (what's the point of writing a web server if the user does all the work of setting up a server and responding to requests?)
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# Part 2: The solution
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The solution I thought of was to dynamically load a C library the user optionally writes that creates pages. The user is responsible for writing C code that generates pages, and swebs is responsible for parsing requests and asking for said pages. The library the user creates must be a shared object file, and define this function:
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```int getResponse(Request *request, Response *response)```
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```getResponse``` returns the HTTP response code of that request.
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```Request``` and ```Response``` are defined in ```<swebs/types.h>```. ```getResponse()```. ```<swebs/types.h>``` is guarunteed to be included by ```<swebs/swebs.h>```, where ```getResponse()``` is defined.
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The specific library to use is set with the ```library``` global variable in a sitefile.
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The various data types important to you in this scenario are:
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```
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typedef struct {
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char *field;
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char *value;
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} Field;
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/*HTTP field*/
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typedef struct {
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long fieldCount;
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Field *fields;
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} Request;
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/*HTTP request, pretty self explanatory*/
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typedef enum {
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FILE_KNOWN_LENGTH,
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/* A file where the total length is known (i.e. a file on disk) */
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FILE_UNKNOWN_LENGTH,
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/* A file where the total length is unknown (i.e. a pipe) */
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BUFFER,
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/* A buffer stored in memory. free() will be called on said buffer. */
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DEFAULT
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/* The default response for the response code */
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} ResponseType;
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typedef struct {
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int fd;
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size_t len;
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/* This field is sometimes optional */
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} File;
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typedef struct {
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void *data;
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/* This data will be freed. */
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size_t len;
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} Buffer;
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typedef struct {
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ResponseType type;
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union {
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File file;
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Buffer buffer;
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} response;
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} Response;
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```
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