Getting Closer

With YAPC::NA only a handful of days away, it is crunch time for me. I had set a deadline of last night to have Voltron finished, and as typical, life got in the way. I am close though and should finish today. But the schedule I've made for myself for this week includes a 'few days' to make slides and solidify my presentations. So I have a little buffer room, but really, I don't want to be scrambling to do slides the weekend before or, gasp, during someone else's talk.

When it comes to building a complete stack for a project one of the things I love most is recognizing a missing functionality and implementing it in the proper layer. This time around, it had to do with arguments passed to callback events from TCPClient. In single connection setup, it was silly to consider context for your callbacks. You only had one connection, so you know you were operating in a particular context. But at the same time, there was nothing in the TCPClient implementation that limited things to a single connection. When I got up to the ProxySession layer, those similar behaviors followed. While there were no limitations in the code to only one connection, the API gave you no way to determine from which connection a callback was originated. And I was okay with that for the time being until I got up to the Voltron layer and realized, it was a silly limitation and imagined a single application connecting to multiple application servers. So down we went.

TCPClient was changed to allow better per connection tracking, multiple simultaneous connect calls, and some other details. Then ProxySession was changed to always return the connection id in callback events, and also enable sending along user data that would show up in the callback. Another oversight was my decorator roles. ProxyEvent was it's own thing when really it should compose Event because you can't have a proxied event without a regular event. That cleaned up some ugly syntax in my tests.

And while all of this is great, and I am making lot of progress, Voltron still isn't complete because I've been adding functionality into my lower layers. In the end though, it will make Voltron an even simpler module with a lot of the complexity encapsulated away.

After I finish Voltron today, I have to start on a simple XMLRPC server/client implementation for my POE::Filters talk. And while I want to Moose that up a bit, I will likely do it in a very non moose fashion (save for POE::Filter::XML::RPC since that was my first foray into the Moose world. Attributes rock). The again, I really really like using POEx::Role::SessionInstantiation. It makes my code so much cleaner and all of the POE bits less obvious. We'll see.

Next week, I'll be blogging from YAPC::NA and will likely see a lot of you regular Perl Iron Man readers/writers there.