apsis-book/docs/design.md

apsis-web design notes

These notes explain the decisions behind the service. They are for someone reading the code, and they describe the design rather than a plan.

Why the standard library only

The ApsisRS workspace is written so that its numerical kernels can be audited without following a dependency tree. A web service that pulled in an asynchronous runtime, a web framework, and a serialization framework would break that property at the layer where the kernels are exposed, which is the layer a reader is most likely to look at first.

The cost is real and worth stating:

• The HTTP server is synchronous and handles one request per connection. That is enough for a documentation and tool service and it is not enough for a streaming or long-polling workload.
• The JSON codec is written here. It covers the subset of RFC 8259 the service exchanges and it is tested against malformed input, but it is not a general purpose library.
• The Markdown renderer covers the constructs the content uses. It is not a CommonMark implementation.

Each of these is bounded work rather than an open ended one, and each is small enough to read in one sitting, which is the point.

Request handling

A connection is accepted, one request is read, one response is written, and the connection closes. The server sends Connection: close on every response, which removes the need for a connection state machine and for keep-alive bookkeeping.

The head is read one byte at a time. That is slower than a buffered read and it is what makes the boundary between the head and the body exact without a pushback buffer: a byte that is not part of the head is never consumed. A read timeout bounds how long a slow peer can hold a worker, and a byte limit on the head and on the body bounds what a hostile peer can make the process allocate.

Requests are served by a fixed pool of worker threads fed from a bounded queue. When every worker is busy, an accepted connection waits in the queue, so memory use is bounded by the pool size rather than by the connection count. The Connection: close policy means a worker never waits for a second request on the same connection.

A panic in a handler is caught and turned into a server error response. The handlers do not panic deliberately, and the guard is there because a panic in a worker thread would otherwise end that thread and, with a fixed pool, quietly reduce the service's capacity.

JSON

Value holds Null, Bool, Number(f64), String, Array, and Object. Objects preserve insertion order, which makes the encoded output stable and readable.

Two properties matter for safety:

• Encoding never produces unparsable output. A non-finite number has no JSON representation, so it is written as null rather than as NaN or inf. A computation that produced a not-a-number value therefore cannot produce a document a client fails to parse.
• Decoding is bounded. Nesting depth is limited, so a hostile document cannot exhaust the stack through recursion.

Strings are escaped per RFC 8259 and surrogate pairs are combined. Text that is not valid UTF-8 is rejected rather than replaced, so a client cannot smuggle a byte sequence through the decoder.

Documents and content

Content is embedded as text by build.rs, which scans content/ and generates a table of include_str! entries. The document layer parses that table once at startup.

A document is Markdown with a small metadata header. The header is parsed for the identifier, the title, the chapter, the summary, the tags, and the prerequisites; the body is rendered to HTML once and both forms are kept. Serving a document therefore costs a string copy.

The Markdown renderer escapes every text node and emits only the markup it generates, so a document cannot inject markup. The {@html} in the frontend is the one place the service hands markup to the browser, and the backend guarantees what can be in it.

Cross references are collected while parsing and checked against the set of documents. A reference that does not resolve is reported by Tree::missing_links, which the state test asserts is empty for the embedded content. A mistyped reference therefore fails a test rather than becoming a dead link in a page.

Search

The index maps a lowercased token to the documents that contain it. A query is tokenised the same way. A token is split on any non-alphanumeric character, so mean_motion, mean-motion, and mean motion all match a query for mean motion.

Scoring is the sum over the query tokens of a weight times a frequency term, with a bonus for a token that appears in the title. The weight decreases with the number of documents a token appears in, so a common word contributes less than a rare one. The index is built once at startup and never changes, so the postings are read only and need no lock.

Graphs

One graph shape serves the knowledge graph, the crate structure, and the algorithm flows: nodes with a kind and a group, and labelled edges. The backend supplies the structure; the layout is computed in the browser.

The layout is a force directed simulation with an initial placement derived from a hash of the node identifier, so the same graph is drawn the same way on every load. The simulation is run to convergence when the data changes rather than animated, which keeps the component a pure function of its props and makes the picture reproducible in a test or a screenshot.

Tools

A tool is a declaration, not code that the frontend knows about. The registry declares each parameter with its type, its unit, its bounds, its default, and its help text. The frontend renders a form from that declaration.

Parameter values arrive as a JSON object. Params performs the typed reads and validates against the declaration, so a handler deals in f64, i64, String, and enumerated choices. A value may arrive as a JSON number or as a string, because a form control sends text; both are accepted. A value outside its declared bounds is rejected with the parameter name, which is what lets the form highlight the field.

A handler shapes its result through out, which fixes the result to scalars, a table, and numeric series. The frontend has one result renderer, so adding a tool means adding a declaration and a handler and changing nothing in the frontend.

An error carries the parameter name when the failure is a bad input and a message written for the user of the form. The message names the condition and the accepted range. It does not quote internal state, so a failure cannot leak the shape of the implementation.

Interface catalog

The catalog is generated from the ApsisRS sources by scripts/extract_api.sh, which reads the crate directories, collects the module documentation and the public items with their doc comments and signatures, and writes content/api.json. The file is committed, so building the Rust binary does not depend on the ApsisRS checkout or on Python.

Extraction rather than hand maintenance is what keeps the interface documentation honest: a change to a signature in the library is a change to the generated catalog after the script is rerun, and a hand written description would drift silently.

The script reports the crates it read in generated_from, which the service returns in /api/api, so the provenance of what is displayed is checkable.

The translation is a separate file, content/api.zh.json, keyed by crate name and by item name. It is separate from the catalog because the catalog is generated and the translation is authored: regenerating the catalog must not discard the translation. An associated item is keyed by the type that declares it, as Type::name, because several types have an associated new; the bare name is the fallback.

A doc comment refers to another item with a Rust path, written as [Epoch](crate::Epoch) or as a shortcut [Epoch::mjd]. The renderer turns such a reference into a link to the interface page of that item. The name is resolved by walking the path from the right and taking the first segment that is a known item, so a link to a variant or a method points at the enum or the trait that declares it. A reference whose segments are all unknown stays a code span, which is what keeps a label such as [0, 1] from becoming a link to nothing.

The documentation comment is rendered to HTML by the backend, with the same renderer the concept documents use, so a comment that contains a list, a table, or a code block is drawn as one.

Frontend and embedding

The frontend is Svelte and TypeScript, built by Vite. The build output is a stable set of file names rather than content hashed ones, so an unchanged source produces an unchanged embedded table and an incremental Rust build does not relink.

build.rs runs the frontend build in a release profile and skips it in a debug profile. The split is deliberate: a debug build iterates on the backend and should not pay for a frontend build, while a release build should produce one binary with no further steps. APSIS_WEB_SKIP_FRONTEND=1 forces the skip in a release build. A frontend failure is reported as a warning and the last successful output is embedded, so a release build without network access still produces a binary.

When nothing is embedded the service serves a built-in page that explains the build step and lists the JSON routes, so a fresh checkout with no frontend build still answers something useful.

Language

The interface is bilingual and the backend does not know which language the reader chose, because the choice is made in the browser and can change without a request. Every user facing string is therefore carried in both languages.

Three mechanisms carry a translation:

• A [Text] value holds a Chinese and an English string and is encoded as {"zh": ..., "en": ...}. The tool registry uses it for every label, the graph data uses it for every node and edge caption, and the chapter list uses it for every chapter title.
• A document is written once in English and translated as a second file whose name carries the .zh.md suffix. The reader's language selects the form; a document without a translation is shown in English, with a note in the page that says so.
• A tool result label is written in English in the handler and translated by lookup in src/tools/labels.rs. A label that is absent from the table is a symbol, such as position.x or BSTAR, and is shown as it is in both languages, which is what a reader expects for a name.

The default language is Chinese. The choice is stored in localStorage and reflected in the lang attribute of the document element.

Two things stay in English in both languages. Units are written with the symbols the standards use, and interface items keep the names they have in the library source, because a translated identifier would not match the code it documents.

Command line

The listener is bound from --host and --port, or from the combined --address. The host may be a literal, an IPv6 literal, or a name the operating system resolves; the name is resolved once, before the listener is bound, so that a resolution failure is reported as a configuration error rather than as a bind failure.

--address cannot be combined with --host or --port. Accepting both would require an order of application that is not defined by the command line, and the resulting behaviour would be surprising.

Interface layout

Three layout decisions keep the pages readable at any window width.

A page is a reading column. Most pages are text, a card grid, or a form, and all three read better in a centred column than across a whole wide screen, so the content is capped at a measure and centred. A document is the one page that is wider than the column, because it carries a table of contents beside the text; the table of contents is part of the cap, and a document with no headings drops the column and uses the reading measure on its own. A graph breaks the rule the other way: it uses the whole width, because a wide screen should show more of the graph rather than more margin.

The interface index shows one line per crate rather than the full module documentation. A crate summary is several paragraphs, and a grid of them is unreadable; the index shows the first sentence and the crate page shows the rest. A doc comment is rendered as Markdown by the backend, so a comment that contains a list, a table, or a code block is drawn as one, and the frontend does not have to parse it.

The graph is drawn on a fixed layout space that is scaled to the viewport. A double click opens the document or the interface item a node names, so a graph is also a way into the documentation.

Search

A query is handled in two ways. A query that yields tokens is matched against the postings; a query that yields no token, such as a single character, is matched as a substring, because a one character query cannot form a token and would otherwise always return nothing.

Chinese text needs more than word splitting. Latin text is split on whitespace and punctuation, but Chinese is written without spaces, so splitting a Chinese sentence on non-alphanumeric characters leaves one long token that a two character query can never match. A run of Chinese characters therefore yields one token per adjacent pair, which is the smallest unit specific enough to be a word. A query of 坐标 matches a sentence that contains 坐标, which a whole-run token would not. A single Chinese character is left to the substring fallback rather than becoming a token, because a token of one character would match nearly every document.

Interface layout

Four layout decisions keep the pages coherent at any window width.

A page is a reading column. Most pages are text, a card grid, or a form, and all three read better in a centred column than across a whole wide screen. A document is wider than the column because it carries a table of contents beside the text; the width of the pair is capped so the two stay together. A graph is the exception and uses the whole width, because a wide screen should show more of the graph rather than more margin.

A grid of cards stretches every card in a row to the height of the tallest. A card is therefore a column, its action is pushed to the bottom, and its summary is clamped, so the actions of a row line up and one long paragraph cannot stretch a card past its neighbours.

The sidebar is a sticky element inside a frame. The frame carries the surface and the rule so the column is drawn for the whole page; the sidebar itself is sticky and scrolls. Without the frame the column would end one viewport down and read as cut off on a long page.

The graph canvas takes the aspect of the layout space, so the drawing fills it instead of being letterboxed inside it. The force simulation settles into a roughly round cluster while the canvas is wide, so the layout is widened to the canvas shape before it is fitted; the change is a uniform scale, which leaves relative distances readable.

Language coverage

A user facing string falls into three classes, and each is handled differently.

Interface chrome — navigation, headings, buttons, help text — is a hand written dictionary in frontend/src/lib/i18n.ts, keyed by a stable name. It covers the graph group captions and the interface item kinds, so a Chinese reader sees a Chinese legend and Chinese group headings.

Authored content — concept documents, crate summaries, item documentation — is a separate file per language, so the backend serves both and the reader switches without another request. A document declares its own tags in each language file under the same key, so the tag list follows the language too.

Derived text — a one line summary used in a card — is produced by the backend from the document, and the renderer resolves the rustdoc forms a doc comment uses. A shortcut reference such as [Vec3] is reduced to the item name; without that, the brackets and backticks appear verbatim in the summary.

Testing

Unit tests live beside the code they test and cover the parser, the codec, the Markdown renderer, the document model, the search ranking, the graph parsing, the router, and every tool handler.

The end to end tests in tests/service.rs start the built binary on an ephemeral port and make plain TCP requests against it. They exercise the request parser, the router, the encoded payloads, the embedded content, and the tool handlers together, which no unit test can do.

One assertion is worth calling out: the state test checks that Tree::missing_links is empty and that the graph has no dangling edge. Those two checks turn a content mistake into a test failure.