SockHTTP: An HTTP framework built with sockets

SockHTTP is an HTTP framework built from socket programming, designed to help developers better understand how HTTP APIs and servers work. This project was created for educational purposes and aims to provide a practical demonstration of how HTTP servers and APIs are constructed from the ground up using sockets. The framework includes several key features, such as routing, support for HTTP methods, handling HTTP requests and responses, and thread pooling for concurrent request processing. Additionally, the repository includes an example application consisting of three microservices built using the SockHTTP framework. This example application is designed to demonstrate how this simple framework can be used to build complex applications. Overall, SockHTTP provides a hands-on, educational experience that allows developers to gain a deeper understanding of HTTP APIs and servers.

The code is written in python and is very simple to understand. The framework totally consists of only four files: httpServer.py, handler.py, request.py, and response.py.

How to use the framework to build HTTP servers

httpServer.py provides Server class. The class's constructor takes three arguments:

1. routes A map that consists an entry for each API. And for each API, it consists of a regular expression representing the path URL of the API, its HTTP method type(GET, POST, ...), and the function that processes the particular API requests. The function takes the request as argument and return the response. The framework parses a http request and calls the function with the Request Object. The function should return a Response Object. The framework encodes the Response Object and response to the request.

2. backlog The maximum number of connections that can be waiting in the queue while the server is processing previous requests. This is basically passed as the argument to the server's socket listen method. Its default value is 5.

3. thread_pool_size The maximum number of threads in the server's thread pool.

Create an object of the class, and call the start method on the object, which takes a port number as the argument.

For instance, the below server runs at the port number 8080 and provides an API GET /reverse that reverses the request body.

from SockHTTP.httpServer import Server
from SockHTTP.response import Response
from SockHTTP.request import Method

def reverseBody(request):
    request_body = request.body
    response_body = request_body[::-1]
    return Response(200, response_body)
    
routes = {"Reverse": {"pattern": r'^/reverse$',
                      "method": Method.GET,
                      "handler": reverseBody}}

http_server = Server(routes, thread_pool_size = 8)
http_server.start(8080)

Check this for an example application consisting of three microservices build using this framework.