writeonce/docs/stories/porch/00-story.md

Story — porch, the writeonce web framework

The second track. Where language-runtime-database/ grows the language, this track grows the one library written in it: porch, consumed by every serving sample through wo.toml [deps].

Numbering restarts at 1 and is local to this track. Frontmatter carries track: porch so a query over docs/stories/ can tell a porch iteration 3 from a language iteration 3. Status rules are the repo's, unchanged: status: in frontmatter is the only place state lives, no directory encodes it.

Why a separate track

Three reasons, all practical:

1. Different substrate, different gates. porch is .wo source. Its iterations are proven by just web-app and just site, never by the conformance corpus or oop-accept. Mixing them into the language track's sequence made both harder to read.
2. Different cadence. A porch slice is days; a language slice that touches wob.h and the VM is longer and riskier. Interleaving them in one numbering forced false ordering decisions.
3. The framework is now the product surface. writeonce.de is served by porch. Its gaps are what a visitor hits first, so they deserve a roadmap that is not buried behind runtime work.

The language track stays upstream: when a porch iteration needs a new builtin, that half is called out explicitly and the language track owns it.

Where the sequence came from

The Fiber v3.5.0 parity study — gofiber/fiber read end to end against porch's actual .wo source: its routing surface, Req/Res API, binder, lifecycle hooks and the Config of all 32 of its middleware/ packages. Nine of those 32 already have a working porch counterpart, so this is a breadth roadmap, not a rescue.

That study replaced language-track iteration 39, which is now a pointer here.

The sequence

Ordered by dependency, not by importance — and the first slice is deliberately the cheapest, so the store pattern and the gate shape are proven before the risky work starts.

#	Iteration	Delivers	Needs
1	Store-backed middleware	rate limiting + idempotency over a @table store, serialized through a sharded actor pool	🔄 in progress; needs no new primitive (call/send/monitor/time.after all landed)
2	Randomness and cookies	a random_bytes runtime builtin, repeated response headers, Cookie: parsing, signed cookies	a language-track builtin (phase A)
3	Sessions	server-side sessions, idle + absolute timeout, revocation	2
4	CSRF	token mint/verify, trusted origins, single-use tokens	2, 3
5	Routing and response ergonomics	the remaining method helpers, named routes, per-route body limit, request ids, the missing response helpers	nothing — parallel to 2–4
6	Streaming core	incremental response writes and chunked framing — the seam three iterations wait on	nothing new, but it changes Resp
7	SSE and compression	server-sent events, gzip/deflate	6
8	Static files and lifecycle	byte ranges, cache headers, directory listing, lifecycle hooks, the small middleware everyone ships	6

1 ─ independent, start here
5 ─ independent, any time
2 ──▶ 3 ──▶ 4
6 ──▶ 7
  └──▶ 8

What this track does NOT own

Not porch's	Owner
typed binding of query/params/form into a class	language: @derive — reflection is forbidden by principle 13
TTL cache, transaction { }, durable job queue	language: iteration 18
a proxy middleware	language: iteration 38 — needs net.connect, which does not exist
metrics, profiling, per-change CI, fuzzing	runtime-v2 7 — observability (was language iteration 30; metrics/profiling/trace-on-trap; CI + fuzz are tooling, split out)
TLS	✅ runtime-v2 9 — in-process TLS 1.3 both directions (2026-09-09); porch can terminate inbound TLS with net.accept_tls, no front proxy required. The proxy-termination doctrine is retired
HTTP/2	nobody yet — a separate protocol slice; TLS is its prerequisite, now met
a runtime template engine	nobody — rejected; markup is a compile-time literal (writeonce-view)
a radix-tree router	nobody yet — waiting on a measurement, not a decision

Review protocol

Same as the language track: the developer reads one iteration, approves or amends; the next starts only after approval. Each iteration is an unsplittable value slice with phases, per-phase tasks, Given/When/Then acceptance criteria, and an out-of-scope list. Every phase ends with both serving gates green — just web-app and just site — because porch has two consumers and a change that only satisfies one is not done.