The Snap team is proud to announce the release of Snap 0.4,
containing a whole bunch of nifty new features. Here is what we've
been up to:
New Features
------------
- Heist now uses the brand new xmlhtml HTML5 parser for parsing
and rendering templates. This eliminates our dependency on XML and
makes it possible to include inline javascript/css in templates.
Check out Chris Smith's blog post for more information about
xmlhtml.
- Along with the change to xmlhtml, we decided to convert Heist
to use Text instead of ByteString. This is a backwards-incompatible
change which breaks old code, but which we feel is the right thing
to do.
- Snap now has support for file uploads (!) and the
multipart/form-data content type. Snap's file upload support uses
iteratees to stream uploaded data and comes with a convenience
function to writeuploaded files to a temporary directory. We put
significant effort into preventing denial of service attacks and
providing policy controls for things like maximum allowable file
size, upload timeouts, minimum upload speed, etc.
- The web server now uses blaze-builder in the output response
body Enumerator. Besides being significantly faster for most
workloads than ByteString enumeration, this allowed us to save
several copies within the server code, giving us a moderate
performance improvement. However, this will break any existing code
making direct use of the output enumerator rather than using
convenience functions like writeBS. We encourage users who are
building up large responses out of lots of little bytestring chunks
to consider switching their code to using Builder and writeBuilder
to get a speed boost.
- The "development mode" of projects built using our snap project
starter is now quite a bit smarter. The 0.3 version used hint to
interpret web handlers on-the-fly, but it re-interpreted the code
on each request, making keeping in-memory state between requests
impossible. The development mode now only rebuilds the project when
files actually change. State will now be preserved across requests
as long as the project files are not changed on disk.
- Our file serving code has been substantially
improved/rewritten. The new code can automatically generate
stylable/themable directory indexes, provides configurable lists of
index files, and allows the user to plug in dynamic handlers. These
handlers can be used to perform arbitrary transformations based on
file type or file content on the fly. The new code also correctly
handles trailing slashes for relative path resolution.
- It is now possible for user handlers to modify socket timeouts,
using the setTimeout function. This (finally) makes it possible to
have long-running request handlers.
Bugfixes/Improvements
---------------------
- Debugging support in snap-core is now turned off by default, as
it involves too much of a performance impact. Turning on debug
support results in a ~25% performance penalty. To turn debugging
output back on, pass the -f debug flag when installing snap-core.
- Bugfix: we no longer log spurious "thread killed" messages in
the simple backend under HTTP/1.0.
- Added catchFinishWith function.
- Changed cookie interface to expose cookies in the response as a
map for easier manipulation.
As always, please let us know if you find any issues with the release.
Thanks!
--
Gregory Collins