First Steps with AnyEvent

This is part 1 in my occasional AnyEvent series

• First Steps with AnyEvent
• Emulating POSIX Signals
• List Processes AKA ps
• Bad AnyEvent Install

I’ve been playing around with Plack and Twiggy recently and that motivated me to take a look at AnyEvent, the eventing library that Twiggy is built upon.

Now, it seems to me that AnyEvent is useful in a similar problem-space to POE (or Coro, on Unix at least). POE has more documentation but AnyEvent can actually use a couple of Event Loops that were implemented in C: EV and libevent which is the backbone of the hugely successful memcached. Sounds good to me.

As usual, first things first. How do you make a simple TCP server? I took a look at how Twiggy does it – the code is available in Twiggy::Server. I won’t need everything in there of course.

The Preamble

I like the way that Twiggy sets a constant called DEBUG from an environment variable. Now I can call the script like this: $ SERVER_DEBUG=1 ./ae.pl and get debugging output.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010;

use strict;
use warnings;

package Server;

use constant CTRL_D => 4;
use constant DEBUG => $ENV{SERVER_DEBUG};

use IO::Handle;
use Socket qw(IPPROTO_TCP TCP_NODELAY);
use Errno qw(EAGAIN EINTR);

use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::Socket;
use AnyEvent::Util qw(WSAEWOULDBLOCK);

Basic Perl Objects

The watch variables only watch while they are in scope. If we have a simple object, we can dump them into the underlying blessed hash reference to keep ‘em in scope. I’m lamenting the non-standardness of Moose here, but that’s another post.

sub new
{
    my $class = shift;
    my $self = {};
    bless $self, $class;
    return $self;
}

Bottom-up or Top-down I’m never quite sure how to present my code. Hmmm…

AnyEvent::tcp_server

So, we’re assuming here that a server object will be called (with my $server Server->new()=) and then we will call $server->start_listen(...).

The example tcp_server call in the AnyEvent::Socket documentation rather unhelpfully demonstrates closing the socket the moment it has connected with a The internet is full, $host:$port. Go away! message. Oh well, maybe my examples are equally flawed. Thank goodness for Twiggy.

sub start_listen
{
    my ($self, $host, $port) = @_;

    $self->{server} = tcp_server($host,
                                 $port,
                                 $self->_accept_handler(),
                                 \&prepare_handler);
}

prepare_handler just logs a basic message on start-up. The accept handler returns a closure to maintain access to $self. The closure sets the socket options and then creates a watcher using watch_socket.

sub prepare_handler
{
    my ($fh, $host, $port) = @_;
    DEBUG && warn "Listening on $host:$port\n";
}

sub _accept_handler
{
    my $self = shift;

    return sub {
        my ($sock, $peer_host, $peer_port) = @_;

        DEBUG && warn "$sock Accepted connection from $peer_host:$peer_port\n";
        return unless $sock;

        setsockopt($sock, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_NODELAY, 1)
            or die "setsockopt(TCP_NODELAY) failed: $!";
        $sock->autoflush(1);

        # my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new_from_fd($sock, 'r+');
        # $socket->autoflush(1);
        # $socket->blocking(0);

        $self->watch_socket($sock);
    };
}

AnyEvent IO watcher

The watcher is setup to echo whatever it received, back to the sender. If it receives EOF (sent when a telnet client hits CTRL-D), then it terminates the connection.

Now, I didn’t manage to get this working immediately. If the watcher goes out of scope, it doesn’t end up watching anything. And I originally omitted the undef $headers_io_watcher statements. As the closure wasn’t referring to the watcher variable, it went out of scope immediately. Adding them added a reference which stopped that happening. Nice, if a little subtle.

sub watch_socket
{
    my ($self, $sock) = @_;

    my $headers_io_watcher;

    $headers_io_watcher = AE::io $sock, 0, sub {
        while (defined(my $line = <$sock>)) {
            $line =~ s/\r?\n$//;
            say "Received: [$line] " . length($line) . ' ' . ord($line);

            if (length($line) == 1 and ord($line) == CTRL_D) {
                print $sock "Received EOF.  Closing connection...\r\n";
                undef $headers_io_watcher;
            } else {
                print $sock "You sent [$line]\r\n";
            }
        }

        if ($! and $! != EAGAIN && $! != EINTR && $! != WSAEWOULDBLOCK ) {
            undef $headers_io_watcher;
            die $!;
        } elsif (!$!) {
            undef $headers_io_watcher;
            die "client disconnected";
        }
    };
}

main()

package main;

my $host = undef;
my $port = 12345;

my $server = Server->new();
$server->start_listen($host, $port);

AE::cv->recv();

And here is the result.

$ telnet localhost 12345
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
hello
You sent [hello]
Received EOF.  Closing connection...
Connection closed by foreign host.

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