servitor/jtp

JTP: JSON Transfer Protocol

JTP is a profile (in the same sense as RFC 3339) of HTTP/1.0 that facilitates extremely simple transfer of JSON objects or arrays over a TCP connection.

Motivation

I had read about the gemini:// protocol as a simplified alternative to https://, and so I wanted to explore how complicated https:// really was. Ultimately, I found that the subset of features needed to do a basic JSON transfer is extremely simple.

Request

The format of the request I send is

GET /resource.json HTTP/1.0
Host: server.org
Accept: application/activity+json

I specify the version as HTTP/1.0 to prevent the server from sending me a chunked-transfer encoded response. I specify Host: because, although not formally required in HTTP/1.0, many servers complain about its absence. Accept: is how I request that the server send me ActivityPub JSON instead of text/html.

Responses

My response parsing handles any valid response to an HTTP/1.0 request, but the most minimal responses I accept are as follows.

In the successful case:

HTTP/1.1 200
content-type: application/activity+json

{
    "the": "json"
}

In the redirect case:

HTTP/1.1 300
location: /over-here.json

And in the error case:

HTTP/1.1 400