Building real-time systems on top of Drupal with Node.js

My talk from DrupalCon Munich 2012.

Transcript

1. August 23rd, 2012 Building real-time systems on top of Drupal with Node.js Mikkel Høgh / afd42.com mandag den 29. oktober 12
2. Building real-time systems on top of Drupal with Node.js Presented by Mikkel Høgh Design & User Experience 2 mandag den 29. oktober 12
3. It all started with this 3 mandag den 29. oktober 12
4. Why? • For some use cases, some or all of the following is True: – Drupal is slow – PHP doesn’t scale – PHP was never designed for this • Isomorphic code • Separation of concerns (CMS vs API) 4 mandag den 29. oktober 12
5. Drupal is slow • Hardly controversial 5 mandag den 29. oktober 12
6. PHP doesn’t scale • Synchronous • Single threaded • Shared nothing 6 mandag den 29. oktober 12
7. Synchronous/single threaded • Resource hogging • Worst of both worlds 7 mandag den 29. oktober 12
8. Four-lane highway 8 mandag den 29. oktober 12
9. Where synchronous hurts 9 Running PHP code Waiting for the database to respond Waiting for external web services mandag den 29. oktober 12
10. Real-world example 10 On any given Monday, we will have ~150 Apache processes running, spending ~15 GB of RAM. mandag den 29. oktober 12
11. Shared nothing • Making your server act as it had absolute dementia • Works well for old school web pages • Not really good for modern web applications 11 mandag den 29. oktober 12
12. PHP was never designed for this • Websockets • Realtime • Streaming • etc. • PHP is 17 years old – semantically tied to HTTP anno MCMXCV. 12 mandag den 29. oktober 12
13. Isomorphic code • The ultimate DRY for web developers • Share business logic between client and server • No more having to implement validation twice 13 mandag den 29. oktober 12
14. How? • Database-level integration • Simple REST • RPC • Shared state via Redis 14 mandag den 29. oktober 12
15. Simple REST • Have the Node.js instance be completely separate from Drupal. 15 mandag den 29. oktober 12
16. Database-level integration • npm install drupal 16 1 /** 2 * Validate that the user sesion is valid and matches the uid provided. 3 */ 4 function validate_session(uid, sid, callback) { 5 // Validate the user's session. 6 drupal.user.session_load(sid, function (err, session) { 7 // Load the user object from Drupal. 8 drupal.user.load(uid, function (err, user) { 9 drupal.user.role_permissions(user.roles, function (perms) { 10 user.permissions = perms; 11 callback(null, user); 12 }); 13 }); 14 }); 15 } mandag den 29. oktober 12
17. Demo 17 mandag den 29. oktober 12
18. RPC • DNode on both ends 18 mandag den 29. oktober 12
19. Node.js 19  1  var  dnode  =  require('dnode');  2  var  net  =  require('net');  3    4  var  server  =  net.createServer(function  (c)  {  5      var  d  =  dnode({  6          transform  :  function  (s,  cb)  {  7              cb(s.replace(/[aeiou]{2,}/,  'oo').toUpperCase())  8          }  9      }); 10      c.pipe(d).pipe(c); 11  }); 12   13  server.listen(5004); mandag den 29. oktober 12
20. PHP 20 1  <?php 2  require_once  "dnode-­‐php-­‐sync-­‐client/ DnodeSyncClient.php"; 3  $dnode  =  new  \DnodeSyncClient\Dnode(); 4  $connection  =  $dnode-­‐>connect('localhost',  5004); 5  $response  =  $connection-­‐>call('echo',   array('Hello,  world!')); 6  //  Returns  'Hooloo  woorld!' mandag den 29. oktober 12
21. Other implementations • dnode in other languages • Flotype Bridge • xmlrpc 21 mandag den 29. oktober 12
22. afd42.com 22 Expect us. mandag den 29. oktober 12
23. What did you think? Locate this session on the DrupalCon Munich website: http://munich2012.drupal.org/program Thank you! 23 mandag den 29. oktober 12