Server applications often use more than one thread. When writing network applications, it is common to start a thread for each incoming connection (remember that these are green threads, so they are much more lightweight than OS threads).

To simplify this, Factor has the word spawn-server, which works like spawn, but in addition repeatedly spawns the quotation until it returns f. This is still a very low-level word: in reality one has to do much more: listen for TCP connections on a given port, handle connection limits and so on.

The vocabulary io.servers allows to write and configure TCP servers. A server is created with the word <threaded-server>, which requires an encoding as a parameter. Its slots can then be set to configure logging, connection limits, ports and so on. The most important slot to fill is handler, which contains a quotation that is executed for each incoming connection. You can see a simple example of a server with

We will raise the level of abstraction even more and show how to run a simple HTTP server. First, USE: http.server.

An HTTP application is built out of a responder. A responder is essentially a function from a path and an HTTP request to an HTTP response, but more concretely it is anything that implements the method call-responder*. Responses are instances of the tuple response, so are usually generated calling <response> and customizing a few slots. Let us write a simple echo responder:

Responders are usually combined to form more complex responders in order to implement routing and other features. In our simplistic example, we will use just this one responder, and set it globally with

Once you have done this, you can start the server with 8080 httpd. You can then visit https://localhost:8080/hello/%20/from/%20/factor in your browser to see your first responder in action. You can then stop the server with stop-server.

Now, if this was all that Factor offers to write web applications, it would still be rather low level. In reality, web applications are usually written using a web framework called Furnace.

Furnace allows us - among other things - to write more complex actions using a template language. Actually, there are two template languages shipped by default, and we will use Chloe. Furnace allows us to create page actions from Chloe templates, and in order to create a responder we will need to add routing.

Let use first investigate a simple example of routing. To do this, we create a special type of responder called a dispatcher, that dispatches requests based on path parameters. Let us create a simple dispatcher that will choose between our echo responder and a default responder used to serve static files.

Of course, substitute the path /home/andrea with any folder you like. If you start again the server with 8080 httpd, you should be able to see both our simple echo responder (under /echo) and the contents of your files (under /home). Notice that directory listing is disabled by default, you can only access the content of files.

Now that you know how to do routing, we can write page actions in Chloe. Things are starting to become complicated, so we scaffold a vocabulary with "hello-furnace" scaffold-work. Make it look like this:

Most things are the same as we have done in the listener. The only difference is that we have added a third responder in our dispatcher, under chloe. This responder is created with a page action. The page action has many slots - say, to declare the behaviour of receiving the result of a form - but we only set its template. This is the pair with the dispatcher class and the relative path of the template file.

In order for all this to work, create a file work/hello-furnace/greetings.xml with a content like

Reload the hello-furnace vocabulary and <example-responder> main-responder set-global. You should be able to see the results of your efforts under https://localhost:8080/chloe. Notice that there was no need to restart the server, we can change the main responder dynamically.

This ends our very brief tour of Furnace. Furnace is much more expansive than the examples shown here, as it allows for many general web tasks. You can learn more about it in the furnace documentation.