Why is static a special case? about web

[hoisie]

Yeah, I agree that static files aren't being done correctly. I do like sinatra's approch to this:
http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro.html (the static files section)

By default, they serve static files from the ./public, but you can change that by setting a variable. It would be awesome there was a web.SetStaticDirectory(path) to change the default.

I could do this later this week, unless you want to hack on it :)

[phf]

I think there's nothing wrong with allowing several static locations. You may even want different handlers for those, for example you may want short files to be served using write() while longer ones use sendfile() instead. The problem right now is that handlers in web.go get a string (or optionally a request object) and return a string. If you wanted to extract the code that handles static files right now into a handler, you'd have to add another special case for Connection as a parameter. I am not sure about this just yet, especially since it could also be done with less overhead by exposing a little bit of the underlying http package. For most users this wouldn't complicate anything though, we could still have a default location for static files with a default handler that's used if the user doesn't specify their own. Something to think about I guess, I can't really make that change without know what direction you'd like to go in.

[hoisie]

I'd rather keep the static serving as simple as possible -- one static file directory should be fine for now. If there's a good reason to support multiple static directories than I'd consider it, but right now it would make things complicated.

To serve static files in a handler, you'd need to modify the content-type (which you can't do right now), and use ioutil to return contents of the file. That's why I'd like to have sinatra-like support for static directories, it makes serving static files pretty easy.

Passing the http connection to handlers wouldn't be the best idea. Right now I'm working with scgi support, and that doesn't even use http directly. I'm thinking of changing the optional web.Request parameter to something like web.Context, and that will give you access to the Request, Response, and eventually stuff like Session (for per-session storage), and perhaps other info.

[hoisie]

Static files are in a pretty good state