[erlang-questions] Handling non http in mochiweb

[Bob Ippolito]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Magnus Klaar <magnus.klaar@REDACTED> wrote:
> 2011/8/18 ori brost <oribrost@REDACTED>
>>
>> I will describe my exact problem, maybe there are other solutions i
>> did not think of.
>> Our program provides a websocket service over a port. We wish to allow
>> people without a websocket supporting browser to use it so we use a
>> flash object to do websocket when the browser can't. In order for this
>> to work, the flash object needs to get a flash policy file. Flash
>> forces the file to be in one of two places:
>> - port 843 (flash hard coded)
>> - the port of the ws service
>> Note that the flash protocol is NOT HTTP based.
>> Originally we worked with 843, but we then decided to put out server
>> behind an Amazon ELB. Amazon ELB does not allow port forwarding for
>> ports below 1024 which are not 80 or 443, so our only choice was to
>> implement the flash policy file server in the same port via a patch to
>> mochiweb (https://github.com/nivertech/mochiweb/tree/ori_flash_170811).
>> We also thought of putting the websocket service behind an haproxy
>> instead of ELB, but ELB is better because it is also hardware based
>> unlike haproxy which is only software.
>>
>> Do you see any other solution for this?
>> _______________________________________________
>> erlang-questions mailing list
>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
> Hi!
> This is a shameless plug for cowboy, putting this aside, I think it you
> would end up with a solution similar to this if you were to patch mochiweb
> suit this usecase.
> I wrote a blog post on getting started using cowboy for non-http protocols
> yesterday because of a question on IRC wrt. to finding a reusable
> acceptor/handler pool for connection oriented servers. You will find it
> here: http://mklaar.posterous.com/accepting-and-handling-tcp-connections-with-c
> Now, you would be able to write a protocol module such as
> flash_policy_or_http_protocol that read N bytes from the socket, if they
> match an HTTP method, you can call the cowboy_http_protocol:init/4 and
> handle it as an HTTP request. If they match what you expect to find at the
> head of a flash policy request you can call flash_policy_protocol:init/4.
> The only change I anticipate that you would have to make to cowboy itself
> would be to add an option for injecting an intial buffer into the
> cowboy_http_protocol state to ensure that erlang_decode:packet doesn't start
> reading in the middle of the input.
> (I failed at the internet, I'm sorry if you receive duplicates of this
> email)

FWIW, mochiweb also has a reusable acceptor/handler pool
implementation with an unsurprising name: mochiweb_socket_server.
mochiweb_http is just a handler that sits on top of this facility.

In either case, if you need to stuff something back onto the socket
buffer, there's an undocumented gen_tcp:unrecv/2 that would work if
you can't find an elegant and supported way to do it.

-bob