RRA

2009-07-20 Update: RRA has been merged into Master; hooray! This page has now become historical.

RRA (for “Request/Response Architecture”) is an architectural overhaul of ContentCouch where all tasks previously handled by ‘Getters’, which had an extremely simple interface (Object get(String uri)) and many tasks handled by plain old Java method calls have been taken over by ‘RequestHandlers’. The idea is that at the cost of a little added complexity, some flexibility is gained and unnecessary coupling is further reduced. Before the change, there was no unified way to pass around metadata about objects or optional request parameters. Now, Request and Response objects provide a standard way to encapsulate all of that.

Requests and Responses contain content, content metadata (such as mime-type), and other ancillary information such as whether any file copies done as the result of a request should be done using hardlinks or whether a response is cacheable (meaning the content is purely a function of the request URI).