Webby is a web server intended for debugging tools inside a game or other program with a continously running main loop. It's intended to be used when all you need is something tiny and performance isn't a key concern.
- No dynamic memory allocations -- server memory is completely fixed
- No threading, all I/O and serving happens on the calling thread
- Supports socket keep-alives
- Supports the 100-Continue scheme for file uploading
Because request/response I/O is synchronous on the calling thread, performance will suffer when you are serving data. For the use-cases Webby is intended for, this is fine. You can still run Webby in a background thread at your discretion if this is a problem.
- Fill in a
WebbyServerConfigstructure - Compute the memory requirements by calling
WebbyServerMemoryNeeded() - Allocate memory (or just use a static char array..)
- Initialize the server by calling
WebbyServerInit() - Every game frame, call
WebbyServerUpdate()- Handle requests in your dispatch function
- When it's time to shut down, call
WebbyServerShutdown()
When you configure the server, you give it a function pointer to your
dispatcher. The dispatcher is called by Webby when a request has been fully
read into memory and is ready for processing. The socket the request came in on
has then been switched to blocking mode, and you're free to read any request
data using WebbyRead() (if present, check content_length) and then write
your response.
There are two ways to generate a response; explicit size or chunked.
When you know in advance how big the response is going to be, you should pass
that size in bytes to WebbyBeginResponse() (it will be sent as the
Content-Length header). You then call WebbyWrite() to push that data out, and
finally WebbyEndResponse() to finalize the response and prepare the socket
for a new request.
Sometimes you want to generate an arbitrary amount of text in the response, and
you don't know how much that will be. Rather than buffering everything in RAM,
you can use chunked encoding. First call WebbyBeginResponse() as normal, but
pass it -1 for the content length. This triggers sending the
Transfer-Encoding: chunked header. You then call WebbyWrite() or
WebbyPrintf() as desired until the response is complete. When you're done,
call WebbyEndResponse() to finish up.
- Currently no decoding is done on the request URI.
- There is not much error checking.
Webby was written by Andreas Fredriksson (@deplinenoise on Twitter).
Webby is available under the BSD license. See the file LICENSE.