Comet with Rails + Mongrel
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007In my last post I described how to create a mongrel handler. I said you might want to do this for optimization purposes, but my own interest came about in an attempt to solve the server-push problem with Rails.
Comet is the term that seems to be catching on for server-push via XmlHttpRequest. Possible applications include chat clients or a stock ticker. Anything that wants constant updates will be both responsive and less demanding of server resources if it waits for data to be pushed to it, instead of opening a new status query every few seconds.
Since the server can’t initiate a connection to the user’s browser, the only possible solution is to have the browser hold a connection open indefinitely, waiting for an update. Since Rails is single-threaded, however, this means that one whole server instance would be tied up by this connection - clearly infeasible in almost all situations.
You might say, “Why not have another small server listening on a separate port to hold on to these push-status connections?” Good idea - except that XmlHttpRequest won’t let you connect to another port. This is because the port is considered part of the hostname, and connecting to another hostname from within the javascript sandbox would be a big security no-no. (It would be trivially easy, for example, to inject a little javascript into a site which caused all of its visitors’ browsers to start hammering another unrelated site as soon as they visited the homepage.)
Juggernaut gets around this with a little hidden Flash component. This is a nifty idea, but for me it is unappealing because Flash is not readily available for my platform (Ubuntu AMD64). More importantly, I’d prefer to avoid building technology that depends on a proprietary plugin built by a monolithic, old-fashioned (i.e., shrink wrap) software company.
So holding open connections to Rails won’t work due to its controller lock. But as was demonstrated in the previous entry, a mongrel handler won’t have that problem. I’ll extend the auction example shown there to use server-push.
require 'active_record'
class StatusHandler < Mongrel::HttpHandler
def process(request, response)
id = request.params['PATH_INFO'].slice(1, 20)
current = request.params['QUERY_STRING']
while status(id) == current do
sleep 0.2
end
response.start(200) do |head, out|
head["Content-Type"] = "text/html"
out.write status(id)
end
end
def status(id)
connection.select_value("select status from auctions where id=#{id.to_i}")
end
def connection
ActiveRecord::Base.connection
end
end
uri "/status", :handler => StatusHandler.new, :in_front => true
This assumes your auctions table has a field named “status,” which I’m using as an integer, but any type should work. http://localhost:3000/status/1 now delivers just one value, the status. Where it gets interesting is something like http://localhost:3000/status/1?100, assuming that the status of auction id=1 is currently set to 100 in the database. Now, the connection will hang and wait for the value to change. (You’ll see the database queries in development.log, but no web hits.) Pop open a sql shell and run “update auctions set status=101″ and the connection will resolve immediately, printing out the new value.
Here’s a simple example of making an ajax call to this url from within a page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
</head>
<body>
Status is now: <span id="status"></span>
<script language="javascript">
function respawn()
{
new Ajax.Updater('status', '/status/1?' + $('status').textContent, { onComplete: respawn });
}
respawn();
</script>
</body>
</html>
Experiment with updating the status value in the sql shell and you’ll see that the page always updates instantly. To watch the connections, open the Firebug console, click Options in the upper-right, and make sure “Show XMLHttpRequests” is checked. Reload the page and you’ll now see a POST each time you update the status. There will always be an active one at the bottom, waiting, waiting for the status update.
And there you go. Server-push connections with only Rails and Mongrel.
Update: Mere minutes after I finished writing this article, I came across Shooting Star, a Rails plugin for adding Comet to your apps. So far this looks a little heavy-weight for my purposes, and somewhat platform-dependent so far - not to mention that they push the meteor metaphor a bit far in their method naming. Still, this may be a more robust solution than my little hack, so check it out. If anyone has tried Juggernaut, Shooting Star, and my hack, I’d be curious to hear a comparison.
