[Web-SIG] Standardising containment.

[Ian Bicking]

Alan Kennedy wrote:
> [Alan Kennedy]
> 
>>> The other main one that springs to mind is how WSGI applications 
>>> discover the file-system path name that corresponds to an URI.
> 
> 
> [Phillip J. Eby]
> 
>> *boggle*  Why do you think that URIs have anything to do with file 
>> paths?  In the general case, they are entirely unrelated.
> 
> 
> Well, perhaps it's just that pretty much every web 
> server/harness/framework I ever used has support for mapping URIs to 
> files. How silly of me to try to apply my experience of other web 
> systems to WSGI.

I guess it depends how you're looking at it.  Zope, for instance, is 
exactly the opposite -- files are an extension, not a native concept 
(with respect to URLs).  Quixote and Twisted both prominently feature 
ways to parse the URL to find a resource, which is not a file.  At some 
level, most frameworks allow for this kind of URL manipulation.  And I 
would assume the same is true in Java, somehow...?  At least among 
Python frameworks, URIs cannot generally be mapped to URLs.

Of course, there is an issue -- if not a file, it would be nice to find 
the terminal application for a particular URL.  But that's very vague, 
and something that WSGI does not facilitate.  If we have a bunch of 
middleware, is there any way to say "give me the last one"?  Is that 
even meaningful, as the middleware is not necessary pass-through?  So 
maybe if you think you need the terminal application, it might be better 
to reconsider and refactor the problem.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org