Embedthis Appweb 3.4.0
Home > User Guide > Modules

Quick Nav

See Also

Using Loadable Modules

Embeddable web servers have several competing goals:

To meet all these goals in one server is difficult. Appweb uses loadable modules so that the core HTTP server may be compact, secure and fast while still having the ability to grow functionality as required.

Appweb Modules

Appweb uses loadable modules to componentize its functionality. The following modules are delivered with Appweb:

Name Purpose
mod_auth Authorization handler
mod_cgi Common Gateway Interface (CGI) handler
mod_chunk Transfer Chunk Encoding filter
mod_dir Directory listing handler
mod_file Static file handler
mod_egi Embedded Gateway Interface (EGI) handler
mod_ejs Ejscript Server-Side JavaScript) module
mod_php PHP handler
mod_range Ranged requests filter
mod_ssl Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) module
mod_upload File upload handler

Dynamic and Static Loading

An Appweb loadable module is a discrete unit of functionality that may be linked into Appweb to enhance the core HTTP server. Loadable Modules may be delivered in two forms:

The same programming interface applies to both forms and you can create a single image which can be both dynamically and statically loaded.

LoadModule Directive

The Appweb configuration file specifies which modules to load and in what order. As some modules may depend on the functionality provided by other modules -- order does matter.

The LoadModule directive will load a module and activate it for processing. If the module is already loaded (either statically or dynamically), the load directive will have no effect.

LoadModule myModule lib/libmyModule

On Windows, this directive will load libmyModule.dll. On Linux, it will load libmyModule.so. If the module is statically linked into Appweb, the LoadModule directive will not need to load it.

Appweb will look for the module in the directory specified relative to the directory defined by the ServerRoot. Appweb will search other directories if a LoadModulePath directive is specified. This will nominate a set of directories to search in order when attempting to locate the module.

LoadModulePath "../../bin:../../bin/Debug:../../bin/Release"

For information about how to create a loadable module, see Creating Appweb Modules.

© Embedthis Software LLC, 2003-2012. All rights reserved. Embedthis, Ejscript and Appweb are trademarks of Embedthis Software LLC.