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
   

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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
   

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3. It all started with this
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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)
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5. Drupal is slow
   • Hardly controversial
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6. PHP doesn’t scale
   • Synchronous
   • Single threaded
   • Shared nothing
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7. Synchronous/single threaded
   • Resource hogging
   • Worst of both worlds
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8. Four-lane highway
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9. Where synchronous hurts
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   Running PHP code
   Waiting for the database to respond
   Waiting for external web services
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10. Real-world example
    10
    On any given Monday, we will have ~150 Apache processes running,
    spending ~15 GB of RAM.
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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
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12. PHP was never designed for this
    • Websockets
    • Realtime
    • Streaming
    • etc.
    • PHP is 17 years old – semantically tied to
    HTTP anno MCMXCV.
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13. Isomorphic code
    • The ultimate DRY for web developers
    • Share business logic between client and
    server
    • No more having to implement validation
    twice
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14. How?
    • Database-level integration
    • Simple REST
    • RPC
    • Shared state via Redis
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15. Simple REST
    • Have the Node.js instance be completely
    separate from Drupal.
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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 }
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17. Demo
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18. RPC
    • DNode on both ends
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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);
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20. PHP
    20
    1  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!'
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21. Other implementations
    • dnode in other languages
    • Flotype Bridge
    • xmlrpc
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22. afd42.com
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    Expect us.
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23. What did you think?
    Locate this session on the
    DrupalCon Munich website:
    http://munich2012.drupal.org/program
    Thank you!
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