Webpipes, a compositional webserver toolkit

This paper introduces webpipes, a compositional web server toolkit written using the Go programming language as part of an investigation of concurrent software architectures. This toolkit utilises an architecture where multiple functional components respond to requests, rather than the traditional monolithic web server model. We provide a classification of web server components and a set of type definitions based on these insights that make it easier for programmers to create new purpose-built components for their systems. The abstractions provided by our toolkit allow servers to be deployed using several concurrency strategies. We examine the overhead of such a framework, and discuss possible enhancements that may help to reduce this overhead.