Usually the server I am supposed to interact with is developed in parallel with the client I am developing and there are always situations were I finish a client feature but I cannot test it because that particular feature is not implemented yet in the server.
To solve this problem and to avoid discussions with the server developers and the manager I decided to implement a fake server that would behave like the real server to the client but in the back is a simple program that receives the client requests and returns the expected response (or a bogus response if I want to test the client robustness to server failures).
So my dilema was to choose the best server and dynamic language that would allow me to develop small server side Unit Tests to validate my client implementation. From all the possible options Lighttpd combined with eruby offered the most simplicity with the power of Ruby.
Apache/PHP?? since I started to learn Rails it has been very difficult for me to go back to PHP. IIS/ASP?? well from my previous posts you can see I am not a Microsoft fan and I don't want to install a Windows Server just for testing. Rails?? it very good and flexible I don't want to be creating complete Rails applications everytime I need to test a little feature in my application.
Lighttpd in Gentoo Linux
My linux server is running the Gentoo distribution and fortunately Lighttpd is in the portage tree. Installing lighttpd can be done with one command:
# emerge lighttpd
At this time the version of lighttpd is 1.4.11. One of the reasons I choose lighttpd is that configuring Lighttpd is a breeze. With little effort I can have a working HTTP server. The configuration file I use is below. Pay attention to the blue lines that are required to serve eruby pages.
# Load the modules I need
server.modules = (
"mod_rewrite", # For rewriting URLs
"mod_cgi" # For dispaching eruby
)
# Server configuration
server.port = 80
server.username = "lighttpd"
server.groupname = "lighttpd"
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.indexfiles = ( "index.html", "index.rhtml" )
server.document-root = "/var/www/localhost/htdocs"
server.errorlog = "/var/www/localhost/htdocs/log/server.log"
mimetype.assign = (
".css" => "text/css",
".gif" => "image/gif",
".htm" => "text/html",
".html" => "text/html",
".jpeg" => "image/jpeg",
".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
".js" => "text/javascript",
".pdf" => "application/pdf",
".png" => "image/png",
".txt" => "text/plain",
)
cgi.assign = ( ".rhtml" => "/usr/bin/eruby" )
This configuration usually goes in the /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file. Also we need to install eruby that is also in the portage tree:
# emerge eruby
We can now restart the lighttpd server:
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
eruby Hello World
How this all works?? is very simple in fact. When a client requests a rhtml file the server (lighttpd) calls the eruby interpreter with the rhtml file as input. The eruby parses the rhtml file and replaces all the ruby code with their respective outputs (Usually HTML) and returns it to the server. Finally the server sends the generated HTML to the client.
The point here is that the ruby code that is contained in the rhtml file can be anything ruby has to offer and with the power of ruby it can be practically anything!. Let's see a simple example:
Create a file hello.rhtml with the following code and save it in the htdocs directory you configured on the lighttpd.conf file.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE><%= "Hello World Page" %></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<%= "Hello World" %>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Anyone familiar with Rails/PHP/ASP/JSP can see easily what this code does. What eruby does is to replace the ruby code in between the <% and %> tags with it's return value. In our case we simply created a String object in the tags.
There is far more to eruby than this and when eruby is combined with other Ruby libraries like CGI, rMagick, Base64, etc with get a rich and powerfull set of tools to create from small test web applications to full blow web applications a la Rails.
Some external links with a little more information.
eRuby: Getting Started with Ruby on the Web
Ruby and the Web
Great stuff. Too bad I have to go into Firebug and disable the background and font color to be able to read it.
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