meh/cauldron

I wonder what kind of Elixir is boiling in there.

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Cauldron - an HTTP/SPDY server as a library

Cauldron is a web server implemented as a library, it’s easy to embed into other applications and fairly easy to implement DSLs on it, an example of a DSL using cauldron is urna.

Examples

defmodule Foo do
  use Cauldron

  # respond to a GET / request with "Hello, World!"
  def handle("GET", %URI{path: "/"}, req) do
    req |> Request.reply(200, "Hello, World!")
  end
end

# open the cauldron on port 8080
Cauldron.start Foo, port: 8080

Why?

Because I don’t like how cowboy handles things and there are no other pure Elixir webservers around that I know of.

Speed

Right now cauldron is faster than node.js and slower than cowboy, there’ still space for speed improvements but it’s not a high priority right now.

The slowness comes from protocol dispatching in Elixir, protocol consolidation will fix that.

Also we don’t use an hand-crafted decoder like cowboy does but use :erlang.decode_packet.