webmachine, mochiweb etc. come from Erlang. webmachine is one of the earliest libraries I'm aware of that tried to think carefully about HTTP semantics and str

webmachine, mochiweb etc. come from Erlang. webmachine is one of the earliest libraries I'm aware of that tried to think carefully about HTTP semantics and structured it's work with restful APIs (or web requests in general) according to an actual diagram that you can see here: https://github.com/basho/webmachine/blob/develop/docs/http-headers-status-v3.png https://github.com/basho/webmachine/blob/develop/docs/http-h... There's an expanded and re-worked version that builds on this here: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram/tree/master/doc https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram/tree/master... (follow the links to system, request etc. to see the reasoning and references for each step)