Today, 8th of June, was the setup day before LinuxTag 2010. I am really excited since I've never taken a part in a such big open source event. It's a privilege to be able to talk about Mojolicious there :)
Here are some photos from the setup day.
http://picasaweb.google.com/109117812087018133975/LinuxTag2010SetupDay?feat=directlink#
I've been playing with WebSockets for a while. And here are some links to the projects I've came up with. Server side is written in Mojolicious::Lite. Client side is mostly JQuery. For non websocket browser Flash workaround is used.
Showmetheshell
An interactive shell with colors and unicode support.
http://github.com/vti/showmetheshell
Some screenshots are available in the repo:
http://github.com/vti/showmetheshell/tree/master/screenshots
Showmethedesktop
A HTML5 Canvas VNC client.
http://github.com/vti/showmethedesktop
When implementing this I've also written a Protocol::RFB module. That does the job.
http://github.com/vti/protocol-rfb
Showmethedrawing
A HTML5 Canvas simple colaboration drawing.
http://github.com/vti/showmethedrawing
Mojomber
A simple multiplayer Bomberman clone. Fun to play :)
http://github.com/vti/mojomber
And BTW, Mojo::JSON::Any speeds up everything.
Enough self advertising for today ;)
For a long time there was the MojoX::Locale::Maketext module. But it is currently deprecated since Mojolicious has Mojolicious::Plugin::I18n in its core. Today we will try to use it to create a multilingual website.
While there is always Mojo::JSON out there, sometimes we need more speed. JSON::XS is the first thing that comes to mind. But they not only have different interfaces, but also work different with encodings.
To use Mojolicious under nginx you should first install Mojo::Server::FCGI. We are going to use fcgi_prefork server, since we need a manager. Nginx configuration file needs a couple tweaks. Here is a config:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com/access.log;
location / {
root /var/www/nginx/example.com;
# Our Mojolicious app runs on this address
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:3000;
# Default fastcgi parameters
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
# Fixes
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
}
}
Then run your Mojolicious application as:
$ perl my_app fcgi_prefork
Server available at :3000.
Start nginx. Enjoy.
So here is my first attempt to try this new awesome WebSocket technology. And since Mojolicious is already compatible I couldn't wait too long.
After writing Text::Haml which is a Haml implementation in Perl the next logical step was to write a renderer for Mojolicious. So here it is http://github.com/vti/mojox-renderer-haml. Besides a renderer itself there is also a Mojolicious::Plugin::HamlRenderer module that makes it really easy to plug in a new template handler.
# Load HAML renderer
$self->plugin('haml_renderer');
And then you can write a new template template.html.haml in Haml:
!!!
%html
%body
#main
%h2 Hello, world!
And you will get:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.
w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<body>
<div id='main'>
<h2>Hello, world!</h2>
</div>
</body>
</html>
I don't really know how to program in JavaScript and that's why I chose JQuery to do all the job with AJAX. Let's see how short and easy the solution in Mojolicious::Lite could be.
After experimenting with Redis in Mojo (http://github.com/vti/mojox-socket_stream) I wanted to do something asynchronously with DBI also, using my another Async::ORM module. But apparently doing async with DBI is not that easy. By itself DBI blocks everything and thus there are a few workarounds on CPAN with forks, sockets and pipes like AnyEvent::DBI, POE::Component::EasyDBI, POE::Component::SimpleDBI, IO::Lambda::DBI and others. That is why I have AnyEvent::DBI driver inside of Async::ORM. But I wanted to use Mojo::IOLoop as an event loop.
Writing another forking hack module is cool but I am not that smart, that's why I googled with a hope to find some event loop independent async DBI. And I found dbslayer (http://code.nytimes.com/projects/dbslayer/wiki). DBSlayer is a proxy between HTTP+JSON and MySQL. You send your SQL query as a GET request in JSON format and get JSON response. So what I needed is a http client that can send json requests and parse json responses. Mojo has got both.
I keep working on async framework agnostic Protocol::OpenID (http://github.com/vti/protocol-open) Perl module, and just finished OpenID associations. It is always nice to have some real life tests, and with Mojo it is fun and easy.