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

My presentation from Drupalhagen 2012.

Transcript

1. Building real-time systems on top of Drupal with Node.js Mikkel Høgh / abl.is Ablis ≫ mandag den 29. oktober 12
2. There will be code on the following slides. A fair warning mandag den 29. oktober 12
3. mandag den 29. oktober 12
4. • 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 Why? mandag den 29. oktober 12
5. • Hardly controversial Drupal is slow mandag den 29. oktober 12
6. • Synchronous • Single threaded • Shared nothing PHP doesn’t scale mandag den 29. oktober 12
7. • Resource hogging • Worst of both worlds Synchronous/single threaded mandag den 29. oktober 12
8. Four-lane highway mandag den 29. oktober 12
9. Running PHP code Waiting for the database to respond Waiting for external web services Where synchronous hurts mandag den 29. oktober 12
10. On any given Monday, we will have ~150 Apache processes running, spending ~15 GB of RAM. Real-world example mandag den 29. oktober 12
11. • Your server acting as it had absolute dementia • Works well for old school web pages • Not really good for modern web applications Shared nothing mandag den 29. oktober 12
12. • Websockets • Realtime • Streaming • etc. • PHP is 17 years old – semantically tied to HTTP anno MCMXCV. PHP was never designed for this mandag den 29. oktober 12
13. Meet node.js 1  var  http  =  require(‘http’); 2  http.createServer(function  (req,  res)  { 3    res.writeHead(200,  {‘Content-­‐Type’:  ‘text/plain’}); 4    res.end(‘Hello  World\n’); 5  }).listen(1337,  ‘127.0.0.1’); 6  console.log(‘Server  running  at  http://127.0.0.1:1337/’); mandag den 29. oktober 12
14. What? • Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. • Node.js uses an event-driven, non- blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data- intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. mandag den 29. oktober 12
15. What?! • Tool for building fast network services • Uses the same JavaScript engine as Google Chrome (V8) mandag den 29. oktober 12
16. • The ultimate DRY for web developers • Share business logic between client and server • No more having to implement validation twice Isomorphic code mandag den 29. oktober 12
17. Speed, speed, speed Benchmarks are meaningless, but… mandag den 29. oktober 12
18. Easily 10x faster than PHP/nginx (for what we use it for, anyways) mandag den 29. oktober 12
19. Simple AJAX responses in ~50 ms. Includes HTTPS, database queries, etc. mandag den 29. oktober 12
20. Stateful server • Everything is so much easier (just stick it in an array) • Everything is so much harder (what’s going on here, who moved my cheese?) • No database roundtrips (fast) • No persistence (ouch) mandag den 29. oktober 12
21. • Database-level integration • Simple REST • RPC • Shared state via Redis How? mandag den 29. oktober 12
22. Have the Node.js instance be completely separate from Drupal. Simple REST mandag den 29. oktober 12
23. • npm install drupal  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  } Database-level integration mandag den 29. oktober 12
24. Demo mandag den 29. oktober 12
25. • DNode on both ends RPC mandag den 29. oktober 12
26.  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); Node.js mandag den 29. oktober 12
27. 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!' PHP mandag den 29. oktober 12
28. • dnode in other languages • Flotype Bridge • xmlrpc Other implementations mandag den 29. oktober 12
29. Benefits • Response time • Concurrency • Server-side state in memory • JavaScript everywhere • Speed mandag den 29. oktober 12
30. https://abl.is/ Expect us. Ablis ≫ mandag den 29. oktober 12