Dancer2-Plugin-WebSocket

add a websocket interface to your Dancers app


License
Artistic-1.0-Perl

Documentation

NAME

Dancer2::Plugin::WebSocket - add a websocket interface to your Dancers app

VERSION

version 0.1.1

SYNOPSIS

bin/app.psgi:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use FindBin;
use lib "$FindBin::Bin/../lib";

use Plack::Builder;

use MyApp;

builder {
    mount( MyApp->websocket_mount );
    mount '/' => MyApp->to_app;
}

config.yml:

plugins:
    WebSocket:
        # default values
        serializer: 0
        mount_path: /ws

MyApp.pm:

package MyApp;

use Dancer2;
use Dancer2::Plugin::WebSocket;

websocket_on_message sub {
  my( $conn, $message ) = @_;
  $conn->send( $message . ' world!' );
};

get '/' => sub {
  my $ws_url = websocket_url;
  return <<"END";
    <html>
      <head><script>
          var urlMySocket = "$ws_url";

          var mySocket = new WebSocket(urlMySocket);

          mySocket.onmessage = function (evt) {
            console.log( "Got message " + evt.data );
          };

          mySocket.onopen = function(evt) {
            console.log("opening");
            setTimeout( function() {
              mySocket.send('hello'); }, 2000 );
          };

    </script></head>
    <body><h1>WebSocket client</h1></body>
  </html>
END
};

true;

DESCRIPTION

Dancer2::Plugin::WebSocket provides an interface to Plack::App::WebSocket and allows to interact with the webSocket connections within the Dancer app.

Plack::App::WebSocket, and thus this plugin, requires a plack server that supports the psgi streaming, nonblocking and io. Twiggy is the most popular server that fits the bill.

CONFIGURATION

  • serializer

    If serializer is set to a true value, messages will be assumed to be JSON objects and will be automatically encoded/decoded using a JSON::MaybeXS serializer. If the value of serialier is a hash, it'll be passed as arguments to the JSON::MaybeXS constructor.

    plugins:
        WebSocket:
            serializer: 
                utf8:         1
                allow_nonref: 1
    

    By the way, if you want the connection to automatically serialize data structures to JSON on the client side, you can do something like

    var mySocket = new WebSocket(urlMySocket);
    mySocket.sendJSON = function(message) { 
        return this.send(JSON.stringify(message)) 
    };
    
    // then later...
    mySocket.sendJSON({ whoa: "auto-serialization ftw!" });
  • mount_path

    Path for the websocket mountpoint. Defaults to /ws.

PLUGIN KEYWORDS

In the various callbacks, the connection object that is passed is a Plack::App::WebSocket::Connection object augmented with the Dancer2::Plugin::WebSocket::Connection role.

websocket_on_open sub { ... }

websocket_on_open sub {
    my( $conn, $env ) = @_;
    ...;
};

Code invoked when a new socket is opened. Gets the new connection object and the Plack $env hash as arguments.

websocket_on_close sub { ... }

websocket_on_close sub {
    my( $conn ) = @_;
    ...;
};

Code invoked when a new socket is opened. Gets the connection object as argument.

websocket_on_error sub { ... }

websocket_on_error sub {
    my( $env ) = @_;
    ...;
};

Code invoked when an error is detected. Gets the Plack $env hash as argument and is expected to return a Plack triplet.

If not explicitly set, defaults to

websocket_on_error sub {
    my $env = shift;
    return [ 
        500,
        ["Content-Type" => "text/plain"],
        ["Error: " . $env->{"plack.app.websocket.error"}]
    ];
};

websocket_on_message sub { ... }

websocket_on_message sub {
    my( $conn, $message ) = @_;
    ...;
};

Code invoked when a message is received. Gets the connection object and the message as arguments.

Note that while websocket_on_message fires for all messages receives, you can also be a little more selective. Indeed, each connection, being a Plack::App::WebSocket::Connection object, can have its own (multiple) handlers. So you can do things like

websocket_on_open sub {
  my( $conn, $env ) = @_;
  $conn->on( message => sub {
    my( $conn, $message ) = @_;
    warn "I'm only being executed for messages sent via this connection";
  });
};

websocket_url

Returns the full url of the websocket mountpoint.

# assuming host is 'localhost:5000'
# and the mountpoint is '/ws'
print websocket_url;  # => ws://localhost:5000/ws

websocket_mount

Returns the mountpoint and the Plack app coderef to be used for mount in app.psgi. See the SYNOPSIS.

GOTCHAS

It seems that the closing the socket causes Google's chrome to burp the following to the console:

WebSocket connection to 'ws://...' failed: Received a broken close frame containing a reserved status code.

Firefox seems to be happy, though. The issue is probably somewhere deep in AnyEvent::WebSocket::Server. Since the socket is being closed anyway, I am not overly worried about it.

SEE ALSO

This plugin is nothing much than a sugar topping atop Plack::App::WebSocket, which is itself AnyEvent::WebSocket::Server wrapped in Plackstic.

Mojolicious also has nice WebSocket-related offerings. See Mojolicious::Plugin::MountPSGI or http://mojolicious.org/perldoc/Mojolicious/Guides/Cookbook#Web-server-embedding. (hi Joel!)

AUTHOR

Yanick Champoux yanick@cpan.org endorse

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2017 by Yanick Champoux.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.