Lately I’ve been toying a lot with Plack and two Perl web framework: Tatsumaki and Dancer. I use both of them for different purposes, as their features complete each other.
Plack
If you don’t already know what Plack is, you would want to take a look at the following Plack resources:
As sukria is planning to talk about Dancer during the FPW 2010, I will probably do a talk about Plack.
After reading some code, I’ve started to write two middleware: the first one add ETag header to the HTTP response, and the second one provides a way to limit access to your application.
Plack::Middleware::ETag
This middleware is really simple: for each request, an ETag header is added to the response. The ETag value is a sha1 of the response’s content. In case the content is a file, it works like apache, using various information from the file: inode, modified time and size. This middleware can be used with Plack::Middleware::ConditionalGET, so the client will have the ETag information for the page, and when he will do a request next time, it will send an “if-modified” header. If the ETag is the same, a 304 response will be send, meaning the content have not been modified. This module is available on CPAN.
Let’s see how it works. First, we create a really simple application (we call it app.psgi):
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Plack::Builder;
builder {
enable "Plack::Middleware::ConditionalGET";
enable "Plack::Middleware::ETag";
sub {
[ '200', [ 'Content-Type' => 'text/html' ], ['Hello world'] ];
};
};Now we can test it:
> plackup app.psgi&
> curl -D - http://localhost:5000
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:31:43 GMT
Server: HTTP::Server::PSGI
Content-Type: text/html
ETag: 7b502c3a1f48c8609ae212cdfb639dee39673f5e
Content-Length: 11
> curl -H "If-None-Match: 7b502c3a1f48c8609ae212cdfb639dee39673f5e" -D - http://localhost:5000
HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:31:45 GMT
Server: HTTP::Server::PSGI
ETag: 7b502c3a1f48c8609ae212cdfb639dee39673f5e
Plack::Middleware::Throttle
With this middleware, you can control how many times you want to provide an access to your application. This module is not yet on CPAN, has I want to add some features, but you can get the code on github. There is four methods to control access:
- Plack::Middleware::Throttle::Hourly: how many times in one hour someone can access the application
- P::M::T::Daily: the same, but for a day
- P::M::T::Interval: which interval the client must wait between two query
- by combining the three previous methods
To store sessions informations, you can use any cache backend that provides get, set and incr methods. By default, if no backend is provided, it will store informations in a hash. You can easily modify the defaults throttling strategies by subclassing all the classes.
Let’s write another application to test it:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Plack::Builder;
builder {
enable "Plack::Middleware::Throttle::Hourly", max => 2;
sub {
[ '200', [ 'Content-Type' => 'text/html' ], ['Hello world'] ];
};
};$ curl -D - http://localhost:5000/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:57:40 GMT
Server: HTTP::Server::PSGI
Content-Type: text/html
X-RateLimit-Limit: 2
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 1
X-RateLimit-Reset: 140
Content-Length: 11
Hello world
$ curl -D - http://localhost:5000/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:57:40 GMT
Server: HTTP::Server::PSGI
Content-Type: text/html
X-RateLimit-Limit: 2
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0
X-RateLimit-Reset: 140
Content-Length: 11
Hello world
$ curl -D - http://localhost:5000/
HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:57:41 GMT
Server: HTTP::Server::PSGI
Content-Type: text/plain
X-RateLimit-Reset: 139
Content-Length: 15
Over rate limit
Some HTTP headers are added to the response :
- X-RateLimit-Limit: how many request can be done
- X-RateLimit-Remaining: how many requests are available
- X-RateLimit-Reset: when will the counter be reseted (in seconds)
This middleware could be a very good companion to the Dancer REST stuff added recently.
another Tatsumaki application with Plack middlewares
To demonstrate the use of this two middleware, I’ve wrote a small application with Tatsumaki. This application fetch a page, parse it to find all the feeds declared, and return a JSON with the result.
GET http://feeddiscover.tirnan0g.org/?url=http://lumberjaph.net/blog/
will return
[{"href":"http://lumberjaph.net/blog/index.php/feed/","type":"application/rss+xml","title":"iâm a lumberjaph RSS Feed"}]This application is composed of one handler, that handle only GET request. The request will fetch the url given in the url parameter, scrap the content to find the links to feeds, and cache the result with Redis. The response is a JSON string with the informations.
The interesting part is the app.psgi file:
my $app = Tatsumaki::Application->new( [ '/' => 'FeedDiscovery::Handler' ], );
builder {
enable "Plack::Middleware::ConditionalGET";
enable "Plack::Middleware::ETag";
enable "Plack::Middleware::Throttle::Hourly",
backend => Redis->new(
server => '127.0.0.1:6379',
),
max => 100;
$app;
};The application itself is really simple: for a given url, the Tatsumaki::HTTPClient fetch an url, I use Web::Scraper to find the link rel=”alternate” from the page, if something is found, it’s stored in Redis, then a JSON string is returned to the client.
