EPrints4 Core Roadmap

EPrints4 Core Development

Trying to divide the work into smaller tasks (and questions where relevant).

Request Handler / Page Controllers

This deals with how HTTP requests are handled by EPrints: when a request is made by a client (curl, browser..) a number of headers/parameters must be processed (e.g. Accept, Content-Type, EPrints' cookies, auth etc). This is the entry point of any web requests to the system. The main module is EPrints::Apache::Handler (formerly known as Apache::Rewrite).

• Low-level filters for processing of:
  • Cookies (eprints_session, eprints_lang)
  • URL encoding
  • specific HTTP headers: Accept, Content-Type, Content-Length, Content-Range, Content-MD5 (?), ETag (?)

• System initialisation:
  • Repository object init (with language selection, via cookie/default lang)
  • Protocol (HTTP, HTTPS?)

• Basic security aspects
  • detect invalid requests/URL paths (e.g. containing a dot '.')

• Low-level redirects or custom actions via Trigger

• Call for Controller(s) to handle the request (e.g. CRUD if /id/..., UI, storage (file delivery) etc.)