From da7225594010d0df20779a0915474ccedd25d7cf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Lo=C3=AFc=20Hoguin?= <essen@dev-extend.eu>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 22:59:22 +0100
Subject: Initial commit.

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+Cowboy
+======
+
+Cowboy is a small, fast and modular HTTP server written in Erlang.
+
+Goals
+-----
+
+Cowboy aims to provide the following advantages:
+
+* **Small** codebase.
+* Damn **fast**.
+* **Modular**: transport, protocol and handlers are replaceable. (see below)
+* Easy to **embed** inside another application.
+* Selectively **dispatch** requests to handlers, allowing you to send some
+  requests to your embedded code and others to a FastCGI application in
+  PHP or Ruby.
+* No parameterized module. No process dictionary. **Clean** Erlang code.
+
+The server is currently in early development stage. Comments, suggestions are
+more than welcome. To contribute, either open bug reports, or fork the project
+and send us pull requests with new or improved functionality. Of course you
+might want to discuss your plans with us before you do any serious work so
+we can share ideas and save everyone time.
+
+Embedding Cowboy
+----------------
+
+* Add Cowboy as a rebar dependency to your application.
+* Start Cowboy and add one or more listeners.
+* Write handlers.
+
+Starting and stopping
+---------------------
+
+Cowboy can be started and stopped like any other application. However the
+Cowboy application do not start any listener, those must be started manually.
+
+A listener is a special kind of supervisor that handles a pool of acceptor
+processes. An acceptor simply accept connections and forward them to a
+protocol module, for example HTTP. You must thus define the transport and
+protocol module to use for the listener, their options and the number of
+acceptors in the pool before you can start a listener supervisor.
+
+For HTTP applications the transport can be either TCP or SSL for HTTP and
+HTTPS respectively. On the other hand, the protocol is of course HTTP.
+
+Code speaks more than words:
+
+    application:start(cowboy),
+    Dispatch = [
+        %% Host, Path, Handler, Opts
+        {'_', '_', my_handler, []}
+    ],
+    %% NbAcceptors, Transport, TransOpts, Protocol, ProtoOpts
+    cowboy_listener_sup:start_link(100,
+        cowboy_tcp_transport, [{port, 8080}],
+        cowboy_http_protocol, [{dispatch, Dispatch}]
+    ).
+
+You must also write the `my_handler` module to process requests. You can
+use one of the predefined handlers or write your own. An hello world HTTP
+handler could be written like this:
+
+    -module(my_handler).
+    -export([handle/2]).
+
+    handle(Opts, Req) ->
+        {reply, 200, [], "Hello World!"}.
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