URLs

The URL itself is a relatively uninteresting (yet very important) notion for the design of Redox. The interesting part is what it represents.

The URL

In short, a URL is an identifier of a resource. It contains two parts:

1. The scheme part. This represents the "receiver", i.e. what scheme will handle the (F)OPEN call. This can be any arbitrary UTF-8 string, and will often simply be the name of your protocol.

2. The reference part. This represents the "payload" of the URL, namely what the URL refers to. Consider file, as an example. A URL starting with file: simply has a reference which is a path to a file. The reference can be any arbitrary byte string. The parsing, interpretation, and storage of the reference is left to the scheme. For this reason, it is not required to be a tree-like structure.

So, the string representation of a URL looks like:

[scheme]:[reference]

For example:

file:/path/to/myfile

Note that // is not required, for convenience.

Opening a URL

URLs can be opened, yielding schemes, which can be opened to resources, which can be read, written and (for some resources) seeked (there are more operations which are described later on).

For compatibility reasons, we use a file API similar to the Rust standard library's for opening URLs:

use std::fs::OpenOptions;
use std::io::prelude::*;


fn main() {
    // Let's read from a TCP stream
    let tcp = OpenOptions::new()
                .read(true) // readable
                .write(true) // writable
                .open("tcp:0.0.0.0");
}

TODO: Maybe do something with the tcp stream. Ping-pong?

TODO: The terminology may be somewhat confusing for the reader.