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<title>tipidee: the future</title>
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<a href="index.html">tipidee</a><br />
<a href="//skarnet.org/software/">Software</a><br />
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<h1> tipidee: the future </h1>
<p>
tipidee is fully functional, and you are encouraged to use it; however, it
is not yet considered <em>complete</em>. There are some optional features
of HTTP that would be nice to have, and that may be implemented at some point
down the line.
</p>
<h2> Ranges </h2>
<p>
<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9110#section-14">Ranges</a>
are a useful part of HTTP when you are serving big files and connections may
be interrupted and restarted: supporting the <tt>Range:</tt> header can save
bandwidth, if the client only asks for the parts of the files that it's still
missing.
</p>
<p>
It hasn't been implemented in tipidee yet because parsing the <tt>Range:</tt>
header is rather complex, and serving parts of files (as opposed to full files
sequentially) also requires some extra coding that wasn't deemed worth it for
an initial release.
</p>
<h2> HTTP Basic Authentication </h2>
<p>
HTTP Basic Auth is ubiquitous; and even
<a href="https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/networking/httpd.c#n120">busybox httpd</a>
implements it. It sounds silly not to have it; it would be good to add to tipidee.
</p>
<p>
However, how to implement HTTP basic auth in a secure way is not entirely obvious.
Credentials should not be stored under the document root; passwords should not
be stored in plain text; the credentials database should have more restrictive
permissions than the configuration database; and the credentials database
should be easily regenerated.
</p>
<p>
I'm leaning towards a cdb credentials database, distinct from the configuration
file; but this requires a <em>second</em> offline text file processor, for the
credentials file, and adding support for a <em>second</em> cdb mapping in various
places in <a href="tipideed.html">tipideed</a>. That was more complexity than I
wanted for an initial release; it's not urgent, it can wait.
</p>
<h2> ETags </h2>
<p>
<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9110#field.etag">ETags</a> are
unique identifiers for resources that clients can use to cache data, and only
download resources they do not have. Like ranges, ETags support can save bandwidth.
</p>
<p>
The problem is that creating ETags is pretty resource-intensive on the server
side. You have to maintain an ETag database, and update it any time a document
changes; alternatively, you have to dynamically hash a whole resource before
deciding if you're serving it or not. Both paths are riddled with traps and
design challenges, and neither is appealing to a server like tipidee aiming at
simplicity and efficiency. ETag support may come one day, but it won't be soon.
</p>
<h2> FastCGI </h2>
<p>
If tipidee compares to big Web servers performance-wise, which is the expectation,
it is quite possible that the performance bottleneck becomes the CGI protocol
itself, i.e. the need to spawn an additional process for a dynamic request.
In this case, it would be useful to support other methods of communicating with
dynamic backends.
</p>
<p>
A module system, or embedding language-specific support into
<a href="tipideed.html">tipideed</a>, is out of the question, because it goes against
the design principles of tipidee; however, FastCGI support sounds like a possible
path to more performance.
</p>
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