POEx::WorkerPool and Poke

I am pleased to announce a new release of POEx::WorkerPool and a new TRIAL release of Poke. POEx::WorkerPool is a multi-process framework for implementing the worker pattern in Perl making use of POE as the backend. All you need to do is compose the Job role and you're golden.

Poke is a monitoring framework that uses POEx::WorkerPool for its foundation. Poke gives you the ability to simply compose it's Job role, and add the job's configuration to the config.ini. Your jobs can do anything. Need to run a complex query once an hour to make sure a queue is getting cleared? No problem. Want to ping a server to see if it is alive? Easy. By default, Poke comes with simple HTTP Job that merely hits a URI to see if 200 is returned.

Poke wouldn't be much if it was just a subclass of WorkerPool, it is much more than that. Each job status is committed to a database along with start and stop times. The status of jobs can be viewed through the embedded web component that lets you view the last status result, and the previous 10 for a particular job. The system itself can be meta-monitored by tailing the syslog output. And just about every part of the system is configurable from the number of worker processes, to the level of output to syslog.

Configuring jobs is also very easy as well. Attributes in the job's config correspond to actual attributes on the job class. Your config can contain any number of uniquely named jobs each configured to fire on it's own frequency.

This is another TRIAL release because I haven't written proper tests and fully documented the guts. Some things are still in flux as well when it comes to the embedded web portion. There are some features in HTML::Zoom and Web::Simple that haven't reached release yet and I didn't want to depend on git versions to run this release. Ultimately, I'd like to be able to control job execution from the web portion (pause, one-time run, delete, add), but I am not sure that will be in the initial finished release.

Please feel free to download the TRIAL release and play with it. It comes with an example config. From the project directory, simply run perl -Ilib bin/poked --config example.ini --no_fork 1 and monitor daemon syslog output, and connect to http://localhost:12345/ to see the web output.