README

0. Welcome

nginx-mobwrite is a plugin that enables the nginx web server to
serve as a proxy for the Mobwrite daemon.

http://nginx.net/
http://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/


1. Basic concepts

The Mobwrite daemon is a Python application that listens on a dedicated
TCP port (3017 by default) for messages in its own lightweight format.

On the browser side, the Mobwrite JavaScript client sends requests to the
server by encapsulating Mobwrite messages in the body of an HTTP POST.
Thus a Mobwrite server requires a proxy that can receive HTTP requests
from clients, extract the messages embedded therein, and send them to
the Mobwrite daemon.  On the response side, similarly, the proxy receives
a reply from the Mobwrite daemon and must wrap it in an HTTP response to
send back to the browser.

Mobwrite has PHP, Python, and JSP implementations of the glue code needed
to make a web server act as a proxy for the Mobwrite daemon.  Although is
possible to add support for any of those languages to nginx via a helper
process, I wanted something operationally simpler, with no additional
moving parts.  Thus I made nginx-mobwrite, a plugin written in C that runs
within the nginx worker process's address space and uses nginx's built-in
upstream event-loop framework to talk to the Mobwrite daemon asynchronously.


2. Downloading

The source code for nginx-mobwrite is available on Github at:
http://github.com/brianpane/nginx-mobwrite

The recommended way to download nginx-mobwrite is to select the
latest release from the "all tags" menu at the top of the Github page
and then click the "download" button.  Github will then package the
selected version of the code into a .tar.gz file and download it to
your browser.

Alternatively, if you use Git, you can run:
  git clone git://github.com/brianpane/nginx-mobwrite.git
to check out the latest source code.


3. Installation

Please see the INSTALL file at the root of the nginx-mobwrite source
directory for detailed installation and configuration instructions.


4. Maintainer

Brian Pane  brianp@brianp.net