Design considerations

We’ve used python 3.4’s asyncio library to handle the creating and destroying of connections so that we don’t have to deal with threads. We assume that the web server sends requests quickly enough such that all lines arrive at the same time in our data_received event. This assumption works out in practice as clients will buffer what they send.

We first parse the headers and perform some sanity checking. Throughout our code we raise an exception for error conditions: these exceptions are convertable to HTTP responses.

We parse the headers into a dictionary and pass this to the _handle_request method. This method will read this dictionary and return a response dictionary with the right options and, if applicable, the response body.

This response dictionary is eventually written back out to the transport.