Why CPAN is Awesome

Have you ever written a server? It’s kinda fun!

Yes, I’m a nerd. Anyway, I learned the easy way and the hard way to make a server in Perl yesterday. Here’s the easy way:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature ':5.10';
use Socket;
use Carp;
use constant PORT => 7890;
use lib '../lib';
use WebCritic::Critic;

my $dir = shift;
my $port = shift || PORT;
my $proto = getprotobyname 'tcp';

# create a socket, make it reusable
socket SERVER, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto or
   croak "socket: $!";

setsockopt SERVER, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, 1 or
   croak "setsock: $!";

# grab a port on this machine
my $paddr = sockaddr_in( $port, INADDR_ANY );

# bind to a port, then listen
bind SERVER, $paddr or croak "bind: $!";
listen SERVER, SOMAXCONN or croak "listen: $!";
say "SERVER started on port $port ";

my $client_addr;
my $critic = WebCritic::Critic->new({
   directory => $dir
});
while ( $client_addr = accept CLIENT, SERVER ) {

    # find out who connected
    my ( $client_port, $client_ip ) =
       sockaddr_in($client_addr);

    my $client_ipnum =
       inet_ntoa($client_ip);

    my $client_host =
       gethostbyaddr $client_ip, AF_INET;

    # print who has connected
    say "got a connection from: $client_host",
        "[$client_ipnum] ";

    # send them a message, close connection
    say CLIENT $critic->criticisms;
    close CLIENT or
       croak "couldn't close connection! $@";
}

So that’s the Perl code to make a simple server! Unfortunately it is a little incomprehensible, at least to me. A lot of that has to do with the fact that Socket is just a translation of socket.h. Why are all those functions weirdly named? What do they do? I don’t know. I don’t even care to know. Why? I’m not a C programmer.

So I found IO::All. Check out the rewrite.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature ':5.10';
use IO::All;
use Carp;
use constant PORT => 7890;
use lib '../lib';
use WebCritic::Critic;

my $dir = shift;
my $port = shift || PORT;

my $socket = io(":$port") or
   croak "server couldn't load on port $port";

say "server loaded on port $port";

my $critic = WebCritic::Critic->new({
   directory => $dir
});
while ( my $s = $socket->accept ) {
   say "Servicing client";
   $s->print($critic->criticisms);
}

It’s like, half the length and so much simpler! Anyway… next up: Web Based, AJAX-y, “threaded” version of PerlCritic coming up soon! (I am using it at work :-) )

Posted Thu, Apr 23, 2009

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