The Document domain (see Tclhttpd Domains) supports the delivery of mime-typed content derived from files to a browser.
Tclhttpd is surprisingly efficient at delivering files, because having located the content in a file system from a URL, it uses Tcl's fcopy command to simply deliver the content by means of the underlying Tcl Core (which is written in C.)
The Document domain also supports a wide variety of content translation and negotiation, including powerful templates (see TclHttpd Templates), substitution and caching.
An instance of a Document domain is associated with a document root, which is a directory within some tcl file system.
Pseudo Code of Document Algorithm
- Generate a path from the URL
- Translate URL suffix to file path relative to this Document domain's DocRoot
- Translate paths which specify personal home pages to absolute paths.
- Get file content from path - these alternatives are tried in order
- Look for a fresh template which generates the desired file
- Look for an exact match for the requested file
- Negotiate an acceptable available alternative file and issue a redirect to it
- Pass off to the Tclhttpd cgi domain looking for a Cgi in the middle of the path
- Transform and return content according to type
- a directory is handed off to the Dirlist module
- a file transformed by a procedure Doc_$mimetype, or just returned verbatim if no such proc exists