Serving Images

Today I tried to finish up serving images up over my server. I had previously managed to read files into a byte array. Sending that over to the client was easy, but I had to route the request first. That turned out to be easier than I though. For now, I'm checking if the file exists and returning the appropriate response headers. If it doesn't, I return 404 header. One nice thing about reading everything into a byte array is that I don't have to do separate processing for text or images. So I am able to serve html files as well now.

I still haven't settled on how I want to handle 404s though. I can either do them as a file that is read or I can generate them in my server. Not sure which is better but I'm leaning towards files. That would allow me to specify two locations, a default and an override location. That would allow someone running my server to create their own custom messages.

Tomorrow looks to be finishing this up and probably moving on to directory responses. It seems a logical jump from serving files. I'll also be working on my presentation on code smells. I still need some good examples and I'm finding it hard to write code that it bad in the specific ways I want. Maybe something to do would be to look at old code that I wrote in college. That sounds scary though.