Nate can't decide what to watch on Twitter, and the app restarts are killing him.
- The Twitterthon continues. "It's an infinite stream of Twitter."
- Nate wants to watch
#clojurescript
too.
- Just change the search string to
"#clojure OR #clojurescript"
?
- Should avoid hardcoding the value so we don't have to recompile every time.
- Command line argument still requires a restart.
- Let's use a
curl
UI (like Ep 004)!
- Wait, what?! Why
curl
?
- Can send something into the running process
- Can separate out the client
- Builds on top of HTTP, so there are lots of tools for testing (like
curl
itself)
- Use a URL query string:
http://localhost:8000/search?The+search+string
- "It's a true query string in the truest sense of the term 'query.'"
- "It is actually using the thing for the thing it was meant to be."
- How do we get the query string from the webserver thread to the polling loop thread?
- "This is a perfect case for a global." Oh wait, that's mutation.
- How should we structure the app? The
main
function must:
- start the thread for the web server
- start the thread for the polling loop
- Specific problem: the
/search
route handler function needs a way to send the new query string to the polling loop.
- With mutation: share an
atom
and give the handler and the polling loop a reference to it.
- No mutation? Use a
core.async
channel.
- A channel allows a thread to pass data to another thread.
- With no channel buffer, it will synchronize two threads ("rendezvous").
- (We lie. There is no
peek
function.)
- Problem: polling thread is stuck waiting on the channel, so it stops polling.
- Solution: Use
alt!!
to simultaneously listen to the "new search" channel and a timeout
channel.
- What is a
timeout
channel? A channel that closes after n
msecs have passed.
- New problem: the cache (for de-duplicating) has stale content after changing the query.
- Solution: same logic that adopts the new search term will reset the cache. (See Ep 007.)
- Polling loop structure:
- fetch
- process results
- block while listening to the channels
- if new search string, recur with new cache and new search string
- otherwise, recur with same cache and search string
- Only want the fetch in one part of the loop.
- Don't even need
curl
. Just type in the URL for the backend on your phone.
core.async
lets threads coordinate without having to know about each other!
Clojure in this episode:
atom
loop
, recur
core.async/
chan
<!
, <<!
, >!
, >>!
, put!
alt!
, alts!
timeout
Related projects: