A Monthly Dancer meeting

I've been contributing to Dancer for a few months now, and the discussions occurs mainly on IRC (irc.perl.org, #dancer) or on the Mailing List.

Last weekend, I had the occasion to meet sukria during the French Perl Workshop. This has been really productive, we had the occasion to talk about Plack, the templating system, websocket, ... and I really think we should have met before. It was also the occasion to meet another contributor, eiro, with whom I've been able to share some knowledge about Plack.

During the workshop, I made a talk about Plack and the Middlewares. The direct result of this is the last feature added by sukria: middlewares can be set in the configuration file of your Dancer application, and will be loaded for you.

The next release of Dancer won't generate an app.psgi file anymore, so you will only need to edit your environment file (like deployement.yaml), and add the following configuration:

warnings: 1
auto_reload: 1
plack_middlewares:
  Debug:
    - panels
    -
      - Response
      - Dancer::Version
      - Dancer::Settings

and your application will load some Plack::Middleware::Debug and Dancer::Debug panels.

Sukria has suggested a monthly drinkup meeting for people in/near Paris, to talk about Dancer and Plack, in a pub or another place where we can bring a laptop, have some beers and share idea/codes and other exchange technicals thoughts.

I hope to meet more Dancer developers and users in a near future (sawyer at Pise maybe ?).

By: franck cuny on 2010-06-20T16:18:23

Tags: Perl Dancer

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MooseX::Net::API - update

MooseX::Net::API is a module to help writing clients for RESTful (and even non-RESTful) WebServices:

package my::api;
use MooseX::Net::API;

net_api_declare myapi => (
    api_base_url => 'http://api....',
    api_format   => 'json',
);

net_api_method users => (
    method      => 'GET',
    path        => '/users/:country',
    description => 'fetch a list of users',
    params      => [qw/country/],
    expected    => [qw/200 404/],
);

We've been using this module at work for the last few months on various internal APIs, and I'm pretty pleased with the result so far.

Lately I've started to rework the core. I've tried to split most of the functionalities into roles, and rework the code that generates the various methods. I've also added methods to access miscellaneous information :

my $client = my::api->new;

# to get a list of API methods
$client->meta->get_all_net_api_methods();

# find an API method
my $method = $client->meta->find_net_api_method_by_name('users');

# and now informations about the method
say $method->documentation;

name:        users
description: fetch a list of useres
method:      GET
path:        /users/:country
arguments:   country
expected:    200, 404

It's not yet complete, but a new version will be available soon on CPAN. Here is a list of some more features I plan to add quickly:

• better internal API
• better authorization support (OAuth!)
• add more methods to provide better introspection
• better unserialization
• more tests and better documentation
• generate POD via a PODWeaver plugin ?
• plugins ?
• renaming ? (not sure it really fits in the MooseX:: namespace)

http-console

I've also started Net::HTTP::Console. It's inspired by http-console. It relies on MX::Net::API, and can use any libraries written with MX::Net::API, as well as any raw RESTful API. As an example, let's use it on twitter.

http-console --url http://api.twitter.com --format json

http://127.0.0.1:5984> GET /1/statuses/public_timeline
[
    {
      "source" : "web",
      "favorited" : false,
      "geo" : null,
      "coordinates" : null,
      "place" : null,
      ...
    }
]

http://127.0.0.1:5984> show headers
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
last-modified: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:27:12 GMT
x-transaction: 1275924432-94882-31146
x-ratelimit-reset: 1275925258
...

You can call any method from the twitter API (at the exception of the ones that require authentication: it's not supported yet).

You can also use it with any library that uses MX::Net::API:

http-console --lib Net::Backtweet

http://api.backtweet.com> help command
available commands:
- tweets_by_url
- stats_by_url
- good_tweets_by_url

http://api.backtype.com> help command tweets_by_url
name:        tweets_by_url
description: Retrieve tweets that link to a given URL, whether the links are shortened or unshortened.
method:      GET
path:        /tweets/search/links

http://api.backtype.com> stats_by_url {"q":"http://lumberjaph.net","key":s3kr3t"}
{
   "tweetcount" : 388
}

Arguments to the methods are serialized in JSON format. Not sure if it's the best idea I will see if it needs improvement while using it. You can also perform POST and PUT with content.

http://localhost:5984> POST /test_rtgi_fetcher {"foo":"bar"}
{
   "ok" : true,
   "rev" : "1-fe67006eb0e02e5f0057b5b2a6672391",
   "id" : "fe3175615a34eb28153479307c000f26"
}

It's far from being complete at the moment, but I will extend it quickly. Right now, you can define global headers, and get help for all methods in your MX::Net::API library. Authentication is on top of my priority list, as is alias creation, so instead of doing (on a non-moosex::net::api lib):

GET /users/

you will do:

alias users/:country as users

then:

users {"country":"france"}

(and yes, I've switched from wordpress to blawd)

By: franck on 2010-06-10T11:55:00

Tags: moosex moose rest http-console

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