Trac Web Interface

The Trac project management system provides a nice set of web interfaces. What makes these interfaces nice to work with is that they are concise and to the point. The make defining new Trac web components an intuitive process. There are two interfaces of note in the set of Trac web interfaces. These are IRequestHandler and IRequestFilter. A simple illustration of what these interfaces look like conceptually is shown below.



Both interfaces obviously need to inherit from the Interface class since they themselves are interfaces.

The IRequestHandler interface is responsible for handling HTTP requests. Developers cannot define Trac web components that do not implement this interface. The two responsibilities of components that implement this interface are two determine if the component can handle the request and to return a response. This is different from some frameworks in that the component itself carries the responsibility of matching a URL.

The IRequestFilter interface is responsible for pre and post request handler processing. The pre processing occurs once a handler has been selected but before a response is generated by the handler. The post processing occurs once a response is generated.

Web components in Trac generally implement both of these interfaces. This means that the pre and post processing functionality uses the component itself as parameters. It is a very nice API to work with and other frameworks could certainly benefit from modeling after it.