Hey people,
I want to be able to do more with responses but I'm not sure how to
extend the format without breaking backwards compatibility.
Maybe a good way to handle this is to have mongrel2 inform its ability
to support additional formatting in the messages that it sends to
workers. Then workers can respond with a non-backwards-compatible
format, but this is okay, since they'd have confirmed that the version
of mongrel2 talking to them is capable of understanding it.
Maybe we could use another all-uppercase header to trigger this, like
"EXTENDED_RESPONSE" set to "1". Responses could be of the form:
"{instance} {tnet request id(s) string} {tnet extension dict} {data}".
Then we can forever play with that extension dict and hopefully not have
to hack anything on top of the system again.
One type of extension I want to add is the ability to keep-alive a
connection (reset mongrel2's internal timer for the connection) without
having to actually send data down to the client. Currently, sending 0
data means disconnect, so we need another way. We could use the
extension dict to set something like keep-alive=true.
Really would like feedback on this before I start hacking. Thanks. :)
Justin
