swebs/documentation/dynamicpages.md

Part 1: The problem

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?)

Part 2: The solution

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:

int getResponse(Request *request, Response *response)

getResponse returns the HTTP response code of that request.

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.

The specific library to use is set with the library global variable in a sitefile.

The various data types important to you in this scenario are:

typedef struct {
	char *field;
	char *value;
} Field;
/*HTTP field*/

typedef struct {
	long fieldCount;
	Field *fields;
} Request;
/*HTTP request, pretty self explanatory*/

typedef enum {
	FILE_KNOWN_LENGTH,
	/* A file where the total length is known (i.e. a file on disk) */
	FILE_UNKNOWN_LENGTH,
	/* A file where the total length is unknown (i.e. a pipe) */
	BUFFER,
	/* A buffer stored in memory. free() will be called on said buffer. */
	DEFAULT
	/* The default response for the response code */
} ResponseType;

typedef struct {
	int fd;
	size_t len;
	/* This field is sometimes optional */
} File;

typedef struct {
	void *data;
	/* This data will be freed. */
	size_t len;
} Buffer;

typedef struct {
	ResponseType type;
	union {
		File file;
		Buffer buffer;
	} response;
} Response;