boost_beast/doc/review.qbk

[/
    Copyright (c) 2013-2017 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)
]

[section:review For Reviewers]

To set realistic expectations and prevent a litany of duplicate review
statements, these notes address the most common questions and comments
about Beast and other HTTP libraries that have gone through formal review.

[variablelist
[[
    "Beast requires too much user code to do anything!"
][
    It is not the intention of the library to provide turn-key
    solutions for specific HTTP or WebSocket use-cases.
    Instead, it is a sensible protocol layering on top of
    Boost.Asio which retains the Boost.Asio memory
    management style and asynchronous model. 
]]
[[
    "Beast does not offer an HTTP server?"
][
    The scope of the library is to provide a message container,
    and serialization and deserialization algorithms, with an
    interface permitting users to achieve all the behaviors
    necessary to implement high performance, conforming servers.
    However, management of listening sockets, io_service threads,
    individual connections, and HTTP semantics such as pipelining,
    redirection, Expect: 100-continue, cookies, and request routing
    are not handled by Beast.
    It is the author's position that keeping the library low-level
    will establish it as a building block which the greater C++
    community at large can leverage to produce higher level
    libraries competing with each other to figure out the best
    way to solve these problems.
]]
[[
    "Beast does not offer an HTTP client?"
][
    "I just want to download a resource using HTTP" is a common
    cry from users and reviewers. Such functionality is beyond
    the scope of Beast and will likely never be added. Building
    a robust HTTP client is a difficult task. The source code for
    such a client would probably be several times larger than
    the entirety of Beast! There are many things to deal with
    such as the various message body encodings, complex parsing
    of headers, difficult header semantics such as Range and
    Cache-Control, redirection, Expect:100-continue, connection
    retrying, domain name resolution, TLS, and much, much more.
    It is the author's position that Boost first needs a common
    set of nouns and verbs for manipulating HTTP at the protocol
    level; Beast provides that language.
]]
[[
    "There's no HTTP/2 support yet!"
][
    The Beast HTTP message model was designed with the new protocol
    in mind and should be evaluated in that context. There are plans
    to add HTTP/2 in the future, but there is no rush to do so.
    Users cannot work with HTTP/1 now; we should not deny them that
    functionality today to wait for a newer protocol tomorrow.
    It is the author's position that there is sufficient value in
    Beast's HTTP/1-only implementation that the lack of HTTP/2
    should not be a barrier to acceptance.
]]
[[
    "This should work with standalone-Asio!"
][
    Beast uses more than Boost.Asio, it depends on a smattering
    of various parts of Boost. The standalone Asio is currently
    farther ahead than the Boost version. Keeping Beast maintained
    against both versions of Asio is beyond the resources of the
    author at the present time. Compatibility with non-Boost
    libraries should not be an acceptance criteria. Beast is
    currently designed to be a part of Boost: nothing more,
    nothing less.
    Looking at the bigger picture, it is the author's goal to
    propose this library for standardization. A logical track for
    achieving this is as follows:

    [ordered_list
    [
        Boost library acceptance.
    ][
        Port to the Boost.Asio version of Networking-TS (This has to wait
        until Boost's version of Asio is updated).
    ][
        Wait for Networking-TS to become an official part of C++.
    ][
        Port to the standard library versions of networking (gcc, clang, msvc).
    ][
        Develop proposed language (This can happen concurrently with steps 3 and 4)
    ]]
]]
[[
    "You need benchmarks!"
][
    The energy invested in Beast went into the design of the interfaces,
    not performance. That said, the most sensitive parts of Beast have
    been optimized or designed with optimization in mind. The slow parts
    of WebSocket processing have been optimized, and the HTTP parser design
    is lifted from another extremely popular project which has performance
    as a design goal (see https://github.com/h2o/picohttpparser).

    From: http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html

        "Aim first for clarity and correctness; optimization should
         be only a secondary concern in most Boost libraries."

    As the library matures it will undergo optimization passes; benchmarks
    will logically accompany this process. There is a small benchmarking
    program included in the tests which compares the performance of
    Beast's parser to the NodeJS reference parser.
]]
[[
    "Beast is a terrible name!"
][
    The name "Boost.Http" or "Boost.WebSocket" would mislead users into
    believing they could perform an HTTP request on a URL or put up a
    WebSocket client or server in a couple of lines of code. Where
    would the core utilities go? Very likely it would step on the
    owner of Boost.Asio's toes to put things in the Boost.Asio
    repository; at the very least, it would create unrequested,
    additional work for the foreign repository.
    "Beast" is sufficiently vague as to not suggest any particular
    functionality, while acting as a memorable umbrella term for a
    family of low level containers and algorithms. People in the know
    or with a need for low-level network protocol operations will
    have no trouble finding it, and the chances of luring a novice
    into a bad experience are greatly reduced.
    There is precedent for proper names: "Hana", "Fusion", "Phoenix",
    and "Spirit" come to mind. Is "Beast" really any worse than say,
    "mp11" for example?
    Beast also already has a growing body of users and attention from
    the open source community, the name Beast comes up in reddit posts
    and StackOverflow as the answer to questions about which HTTP or
    WebSocket library to use.
]]



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