Monday, December 20, 2010

Day 20: a praise for Plack

Plack is a wonderful thing. If you don't know it, have a look at Miyagawa's slides. I gave an introduction at the 2010 German Perlworkshop, but it wasn't so good. I assumed a too much prior knowledge, so it was confusing. I won't try again in this short post, either. :)

Let me just say a few sentences: PSGI specifies - like CGI - a standard interface between web servers and Perl web applications (or web frameworks). And Plack is a toolkit for PSGI. With plackup you can start PSGI apps from the command line.

Save this short script as app.psgi and run plackup in the shell:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
my $app = sub {
    my $env = shift;
    return [
        200,
        ['Content-Type' => 'text/html'],
        ['<html><body><pre>'.Dumper($env).'</pre></body></html>'],
    ];
};
Now, point your browser to http://localhost:5000/ and you will see the PSGI environment variables.

With plackup -r you get a restarting server (very useful during development). And -e allows you to wrap middlewares around your web app:
plackup -e 'enable "Debug"' app.psgi
will give you a nice debug panel. (You have to install Plack::Middleware::Debug.)

Normally you do not use Plack directly, your web application framework does it. But for really small web apps, I use Plack::Request and Plack::Response (together with Template Toolkit) directly.

Links:

2 comments:

  1. Can -r be used in production, or would there be a performance hit?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The problem is not -r, it is the standalone server of plackup: It serves just a single request at a time!

    We use something similar in production. But it is not checked on every request. A separate process does it.

    ReplyDelete

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