[/
    Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Vinnie Falco (vinnie dot falco at gmail dot com)

    Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
    file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

    Official repository: https://github.com/boostorg/beast
]

[section Design Choices]

The implementations were originally driven by business needs of cryptocurrency
server applications (e.g.  [@https://github.com/ripple/rippled rippled]),
written in C++. These needs were not met by existing solutions so Beast
was written from scratch as a solution. Beast's design philosophy avoids
flaws exhibited by other libraries:

* Don't try to do too much.

* Don't sacrifice performance.

* Mimic __Asio__; familiarity breeds confidence.

* Role-symmetric interfaces; client and server the same (or close to it).

* Leave important decisions, such as allocating memory or
  managing flow control, to the user.

Beast uses the __DynamicBuffer__ concept presented in the __NetTS__,
and relies heavily on the __ConstBufferSequence__ and
__MutableBufferSequence__ concepts for passing buffers to functions.
The authors have found the dynamic buffer and buffer sequence interfaces to
be optimal for interacting with Asio, and for other tasks such as incremental
parsing of data in buffers (for example, parsing websocket frames stored
in a [link beast.ref.boost__beast__static_buffer `static_buffer`]).

During the development of Beast the authors have studied other software
packages and in particular the comments left during the Boost Review process
of other packages offering similar functionality. In this section and the
FAQs that follow we attempt to answer those questions that are also applicable
to Beast.

For HTTP we model the message to maximize flexibility of implementation
strategies while allowing familiar verbs such as [*`read`] and [*`write`].
The HTTP interface is further driven by the needs of the WebSocket module,
as a WebSocket session requires a HTTP Upgrade handshake exchange at the
start. Other design goals:

* Keep it simple.

* Stay low level; don't invent a whole web server or client.

* Allow for customizations, if the user needs it.

The following video presentation was delivered at
[@https://cppcon.org/ CppCon]
in 2016. It provides a light introduction to some of the earliest
interfaces of Beast (which have since changed).

[/ "Introducing Beast..."]
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[include 1_http_message.qbk]
[include 2_http_comparison.qbk]
[include 3_websocket_zaphoyd.qbk]
[include 4_faq.qbk]

[endsect]
