[Web-SIG] Future of WSGI

[Malthe Borch]

2009/11/24 Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com>:
> Why does this matter?

It's all convention, but the CGI interpretation was to read the HTTP
request line by line until a blank line came and that was the
environment. Everything after that is the body.

If you want to obtain a shorter call signature – e.g. (environ,
start_response) instead of (environ, body, start_response), that's
fine; but maybe this should be a decorator.

You could take this argument further and do this in two steps (leaving
out ``start_response`` in the following):

  (stream,) => (cgi_environ, body) => (hybrid_environ,)

That would preserve all information.

Why does it matter? This is the single most difficult question to
answer in software design because it's a matter of balance. On the one
hand we strive to find the best abstractions to express our problems
which will eventually be serialized into one or more tracks of
assembler code. On the other, we must be pragmatic and stop our quest
in time to still get things done in reasonable time.

I'm not sure the balance is in favor of the hybrid model; when you
google "environ http" you don't see a lot of body input stream in
there. You don't see "multi-threading" in there either; however, in
the WSGI environment, you do! We just put it there, because we don't
know where else to put it! Unable to find or respect the abtractions,
we are lucky to have Python's versatile dictionary. The downside:
bitrot.

\malthe