I am following this example. I've modified my ws_handler slightly with "websocket_handle({text, <<"h">>}, State) ->
{reply, {text, << "You h-in!">>}, State};"
to confirm I could detect specific messages.
I want to track websocket connections. In https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/1.0/guide/ws_handlers/ I see there's a Req object but I'm not sure what to search for to see what it contains.
I found this communicating between http handler and websocket handler in Cowboy ; I don't understand the meaning of the example answer though.
https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy/tree/master/examples/websocket is using pkg_cowboy_commit = 1.0.4 in the erlang.mk, I haven't found an example using the latest 2.0 cowboy.
I want to track websocket connections via an ID or PID in a list, remove a reference when they disconnect, etc. I see no way of doing this besides sending the first bytes of a text on each message being the ID and this seems wrong.
In contrast socket.io, for example, you get socket.id - I want the same kind of reference in Erlang.
I am thinking something like creating a process that references the websocket State. So on
websocket_init(State) ->
Pass the State to a process, and add that new process PID to the State of the websocket
then in
websocket_handle({text, Msg}, State) ->
a custom {reply, Reply} can be sent by loading data from the PID which is connected to custom domain logic.
Related
I see the basic example for Elixir's WebSockex library here but it doesn't really explain how I can expose my own websocket to the internet. This question has answers which explain how to chat to an existing websocket externally, but I want to expose my own websocket. I'm actually using websockex as part of a Phoenix application, so perhaps bits of Phoenix might help here?
I obviously know the ip:port combo of my phoenix application so given these, how do I expose a websockex websocket on that ip:port? In other words, what should I pass as the URL? in this basic example code:
defmodule WebSocketExample do
use WebSockex
def start_link(url, state) do
WebSockex.start_link(url, __MODULE__, state)
end
def handle_frame({type, msg}, state) do
IO.puts "Received Message - Type: #{inspect type} -- Message: #{inspect msg}"
{:ok, state}
end
def handle_cast({:send, {type, msg} = frame}, state) do
IO.puts "Sending #{type} frame with payload: #{msg}"
{:reply, frame, state}
end
end
Please note that I need to expose a raw websocket, not a Phoenix channel, as the consumer doesn't understand Phoenix channels. If Phoenix can expose a raw websocket then I'll consider that a solution too.
If neither Phoenix nor WebSockex can help, what are my options?
Websockex is a client library, I don't think it has any code for exposing a websocket. Since you're already using phoenix, you probably can do what you need with phoenix channels.
If you're on cowboy (and you probably are, since it's the default), then you can also use it to expose a raw websocket. However, it requires some fiddling with routing. You will need to replace YourAppWeb.Endpoint with a manual configuration of cowboy:
{
Plug.Cowboy,
scheme: :http,
plug: YourAppWeb.Endpoint,
options: endpoint_options(),
dispatch: [
_: [
# Dispatch paths beginning with /ws to a websocket handler
{"/ws/[...]", YourApp.WebsocketHandler, []},
# Dispatch other paths to the phoenix endpoint
{:_, Plug.Cowboy.Handler, {YourAppWeb.Endpoint, endpoint_options()}}
]
]
}
I have honestly only done this with raw plug, so you might need to convert the endpoint to be a Plug instead of a Phoenix.Endpoint. Then, you need to implement YourApp.WebsocketHandler to conform to cowboy's API and perform a websocket upgrade (and handle sending/receiving messages), as described in cowboy docs. You can also see this gist for a more fleshed-out example.
WebSockex implements many callbacks, including, but not limited to WebSockex.handle_connect/2. It holds WebSockex.Conn in a state and passes it to all callbacks.
WebSockex.Conn is a plain old good struct, having socket field.
So from any callback (I’d do it from WebSockex.handle_connect/2) you might share this socket with the process which needs it and use it then from there.
Also, you can borrow some internals and check how the connection is being created.
You’ll see it uses WebSockex.Conn.new/2 that returns an initialized connection, that, in turn, holds a socket. In that case, you’ll be obliged to supervise the process that holds the socket manually.
The power of OSS is all answers are one mouse click far from questions.
I am experimenting with ZeroMQ. And I found it really interesting that in ZeroMQ, it does not matter whether either connect or bind happens first. I tried looking into the source code of ZeroMQ but it was too big to find anything.
The code is as follows.
# client side
import zmq
ctx = zmq.Context()
socket = ctx.socket(zmq.PAIR)
socket.connect('tcp://*:2345') # line [1]
# make it wait here
# server side
import zmq
ctx = zmq.Context()
socket = ctx.socket(zmq.PAIR)
socket.bind('tcp://localhost:2345')
# make it wait here
If I start client side first, the server has not been started yet, but magically the code is not blocked at line [1]. At this point, I checked with ss and made sure that the client is not listening on any port. Nor does it have any open connection. Then I start the server. Now the server is listening on port 2345, and magically the client is connected to it. My question is how does the client know the server is now online?
The best place to ask your question is the ZMQ mailing list, as many of the developers (and founders!) of the library are active there and can answer your question directly, but I'll give it a try. I'll admit that I'm not a C developer so my understanding of the source is limited, but here's what I gather, mostly from src/tcp_connector.cpp (other transports are covered in their respective files and may behave differently).
Line 214 starts the open() method, and here looks to be the meat of what's going on.
To answer your question about why the code is not blocked at Line [1], see line 258. It's specifically calling a method to make the socket behave asynchronously (for specifics on how unblock_socket() works you'll have to talk to someone more versed in C, it's defined here).
On line 278, it attempts to make the connection to the remote peer. If it's successful immediately, you're good, the bound socket was there and we've connected. If it wasn't, on line 294 it sets the error code to EINPROGRESS and fails.
To see what happens then, we go back to the start_connecting() method on line 161. This is where the open() method is called from, and where the EINPROGRESS error is used. My best understanding of what's happening here is that if at first it does not succeed, it tries again, asynchronously, until it finds its peer.
I think the best answer is in zeromq wiki
When should I use bind and when connect?
As a very general advice: use bind on the most stable points in your architecture and connect from the more volatile endpoints. For request/reply the service provider might be point where you bind and the client uses connect. Like plain old TCP.
If you can't figure out which parts are more stable (i.e. peer-to-peer) think about a stable device in the middle, where boths sides can connect to.
The question of bind or connect is often overemphasized. It's really just a matter of what the endpoints do and if they live long — or not. And this depends on your architecture. So build your architecture to fit your problem, not to fit the tool.
And
Why do I see different behavior when I bind a socket versus connect a socket?
ZeroMQ creates queues per underlying connection, e.g. if your socket is connected to 3 peer sockets there are 3 messages queues.
With bind, you allow peers to connect to you, thus you don't know how many peers there will be in the future and you cannot create the queues in advance. Instead, queues are created as individual peers connect to the bound socket.
With connect, ZeroMQ knows that there's going to be at least a single peer and thus it can create a single queue immediately. This applies to all socket types except ROUTER, where queues are only created after the peer we connect to has acknowledge our connection.
Consequently, when sending a message to bound socket with no peers, or a ROUTER with no live connections, there's no queue to store the message to.
When you call socket.connect('tcp://*:2345') or socket.bind('tcp://localhost:2345') you are not calling these methods directly on an underlying TCP socket. All of ZMQ's IO - including connecting/binding underlying TCP sockets - happens in threads that are abstracted away from the user.
When these methods are called on a ZMQ socket it essentially queues these events within the IO threads. Once the IO threads begin to process them they will not return an error unless the event is truly impossible, otherwise they will continually attempt to connect/reconnect.
This means that a ZMQ socket may return without an error even if socket.connect is not successful. In your example it would likely fail without error but then quickly reattempt and succeeded if you were to run the server side of script.
It may also allow you to send messages while in this state (depending on the state of the queue in this situation, rather than the state of the network) and will then attempt to transmit queued messages once the IO threads are able to successfully connect. This also includes if a working TCP connection is later lost. The queues may continue to accept messages for the unconnected socket while IO attempts to automatically resolve the lost connection in the background. If the endpoint takes a while to come back online it should still receive it's messages.
To better explain here's another example
<?php
$pid = pcntl_fork();
if($pid)
{
$context = new ZMQContext();
$client = new ZMQSocket($context, ZMQ::SOCKET_REQ);
try
{
$client->connect("tcp://0.0.0.0:9000");
}catch (ZMQSocketException $e)
{
var_dump($e);
}
$client->send("request");
$msg = $client->recv();
var_dump($msg);
}else
{
// in spawned process
echo "waiting 2 seconds\n";
sleep(2);
$context = new ZMQContext();
$server = new ZMQSocket($context, ZMQ::SOCKET_REP);
try
{
$server->bind("tcp://0.0.0.0:9000");
}catch (ZMQSocketException $e)
{
var_dump($e);
}
$msg = $server->recv();
$server->send("response");
var_dump($msg);
}
The binding process will not begin until 2 seconds later than the connecting process. But once the child process wakes and successfully binds the req/rep transaction will successfully take place without error.
jason#jason-VirtualBox:~/php-dev$ php play.php
waiting 2 seconds
string(7) "request"
string(8) "response"
If I was to replace tcp://0.0.0.0:9000 on the binding socket with tcp://0.0.0.0:2345 it will hang because the client is trying to connect to tcp://0.0.0.0:9000, yet still without error.
But if I replace both with tcp://localhost:2345 I get an error on my system because it can't bind on localhost making the call truly impossible.
object(ZMQSocketException)#3 (7) {
["message":protected]=>
string(38) "Failed to bind the ZMQ: No such device"
["string":"Exception":private]=>
string(0) ""
["code":protected]=>
int(19)
["file":protected]=>
string(28) "/home/jason/php-dev/play.php"
["line":protected]=>
int(40)
["trace":"Exception":private]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
array(6) {
["file"]=>
string(28) "/home/jason/php-dev/play.php"
["line"]=>
int(40)
["function"]=>
string(4) "bind"
["class"]=>
string(9) "ZMQSocket"
["type"]=>
string(2) "->"
["args"]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
string(20) "tcp://localhost:2345"
}
}
}
["previous":"Exception":private]=>
NULL
}
If your needing real-time information for the state of underlying sockets you should look into socket monitors. Using socket monitors along with the ZMQ poll allows you to poll for both socket events and queue events.
Keep in mind that polling a monitor socket using ZMQ poll is not similar to polling a ZMQ_FD resource via select, epoll, etc. The ZMQ_FD is edge triggered and therefor doesn't behave the way you would expect when polling network resources, where a monitor socket within ZMQ poll is level triggered. Also, monitor sockets are very light weight and latency between the system event and the resulting monitor event is typically sub microsecond.
I'm looking to develop a chat application with Pubnub where I want to make sure all the chat messages that are send is been stored in the database and also want to send messages in chat.
I found out that I can use the Parse with pubnub to provide storage options, But I'm not sure how to setup those two in a way where the messages and images send in the chat are been stored in the database.
Anyone have done this before with pubnub and parse? Are there any other easy options available to use with pubnub instead of using parse?
Sutha,
What you are seeking is not a trivial solution unless you are talking about a limited number of end users. So I wouldn't say there are no "easy" solutions, but there are solutions.
The reason is your server would need to listen (subscribe) to every chat channel that is active and store the messages being sent into your database. Imagine your app scaling to 1 million users (doesn't even need to get that big, but that number should help you realize how this can get tricky to scale where several server instances are listening to channels in a non-overlapping manner or with overlap but using a server queue implementation and de-duping messages).
That said, yes, there are PubNub customers that have implemented such a solution - Parse not being the key to making this happen, by the way.
You have three basic options for implementing this:
Implement a solution that will allow many instances of your server to subscribe to all of the channels as they become active and store the messages as they come in. There are a lot of details to making this happen so if you are not up to this then this is not likely where you want to go.
There is a way to monitor all channels that become active or inactive with PubNub Presence webhooks (enable Presence on your keys). You would use this to keep a list of all channels that your server would use to pull history (enable Storage & Playback on your keys) from in an on-demand (not completely realtime) fashion.
For every channel that goes active or inactive, your server will receive these events via the REST call (and endpoint that you implement on your server - your Parse server in this case):
channel active: record "start chat" timetoken in your Parse db
channel inactive: record "end chat" timetoken in your Parse db
the inactive event is the kickoff for a process that uses start/end timetokens that you recorded for that channel to get history from for channel from PubNub: pubnub.history({channel: channelName, start:startTT, end:endTT})
you will need to iterate on this history call until you receive < 100 messages (100 is the max number of messages you can retrieve at a time)
as you retrieve these messages you will save them to your Parse db
New Presence Webhooks have been added:
We now have webhooks for all presence events: join, leave, timeout, state-change.
Finally, you could just save each message to Parse db on success of every pubnub.publish call. I am not a Parse expert and barely know all of its capabilities but I believe they have some sort or store local then sync to cloud db option (like StackMob when that was a product), but even if not, you will save msg to Parse cloud db directly.
The code would look something like this (not complete, likely errors, figure it out or ask PubNub support for details) in your JavaScript client (on the browser).
var pubnub = PUBNUB({
publish_key : your_pub_key,
subscribe_key : your_sub_key
});
var msg = ... // get the message form your UI text box or whatever
pubnub.publish({
// this is some variable you set up when you enter a chat room
channel: chat_channel,
message: msg
callback: function(event){
// DISCLAIMER: code pulled from [Parse example][4]
// but there are some object creation details
// left out here and msg object is not
// fully fleshed out in this sample code
var ChatMessage = Parse.Object.extend("ChatMessage");
var chatMsg = new ChatMessage();
chatMsg.set("message", msg);
chatMsg.set("user", uuid);
chatMsg.set("channel", chat_channel);
chatMsg.set("timetoken", event[2]);
// this ChatMessage object can be
// whatever you want it to be
chatMsg.save();
}
error: function (error) {
// Handle error here, like retry until success, for example
console.log(JSON.stringify(error));
}
});
You might even just store the entire set of publishes (on both ends of the conversation) based on time interval, number of publishes or size of total data but be careful because either user could exit the chat and the browser without notice and you will fail to save. So the per publish save is probably best practice if a bit noisy.
I hope you find one of these techniques as a means to get started in the right direction. There are details left out so I expect you will have follow up questions.
Just some other links that might be helpful:
http://blog.parse.com/learn/building-a-killer-webrtc-video-chat-app-using-pubnub-parse/
http://www.pubnub.com/blog/realtime-collaboration-sync-parse-api-pubnub/
https://www.pubnub.com/knowledge-base/discussion/293/how-do-i-publish-a-message-from-parse
And we have a PubNub Parse SDK, too. :)
Using shelf_auth I can extract current user information from request this way:
getAuthenticatedContext(request)
.map((ac) => ac.principal.name)
.getOrElse(() => 'guest')
but, obviously, I need a request for that to work :)
On the other hand, using shelf_web_socket, establishing of websocket connection executes handler like that:
handleWS(CompatibleWebSocket ws){
// Here I should get user from getAuthenticatedContext()
// but I cannot due to absence of Request here.
ws.messages.listen(...);
};
rootRouter.get('/ws', webSocketHandler(handleWS), middleWare: authMiddleware);
But I have no idea how to forward original socket connection request to my handleWS, to be able to know which user just connected to server.
Another question is what is best practice to store these open sockets, to being able to send broadcast messages to all connected clients, and delete corresponding socket when it's closed.
First what is coming to my mind is to store sockets in a map like Map<int,CompatibleWebSocket>, where int is CompatibleWebSocket.hash().
Then I can iterate over Map.values() to do broadcast, and delete by key when connection is closed.
I can't get if that technique overcomplicated for such task and maybe exist more convenient way doing that, like storing them in a list? Or can I join Streams somehow for broadcasting?
Fairly new to zeromq and trying to get a basic pub/sub to work. When I run the following (sub starting before pub) the publisher finishes but the subscriber hangs having not received all the messages - why ?
I think the socket is being closed but the messages have been sent ? Is there a way of ensuring all messages are received ?
Publisher:
import zmq
import random
import time
import tnetstring
context=zmq.Context()
socket=context.socket(zmq.PUB)
socket.bind("tcp://*:5556")
y=0
for x in xrange(5000):
st = random.randrange(1,10)
data = []
data.append(random.randrange(1,100000))
data.append(int(time.time()))
data.append(random.uniform(1.0,10.0))
s = tnetstring.dumps(data)
print 'Sending ...%d %s' % (st,s)
socket.send("%d %s" % (st,s))
print "Messages sent: %d" % x
y+=1
print '*** SERVER FINISHED. # MESSAGES SENT = ' + str(y)
Subscriber :-
import sys
import zmq
import tnetstring
# Socket to talk to server
context = zmq.Context()
socket = context.socket(zmq.SUB)
socket.connect("tcp://localhost:5556")
filter = "" # get all messages
socket.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, filter)
x=0
while True:
topic,data = socket.recv().split()
print "Topic: %s, Data = %s. Total # Messages = %d" % (topic,data,x)
x+=1
In ZeroMQ, clients and servers always try to reconnect; they won't go down if the other side disconnects (because in many cases you'd want them to resume talking if the other side comes up again). So in your test code, the client will just wait until the server starts sending messages again, unless you stop recv()ing messages at some point.
In your specific instance, you may want to investigate using the socket.close() and context.term(). It will block until all the messages have been sent. You also have the problem of a slow joiner. You can add a sleep after the bind, but before you start publishing. This works in a test case, but you will want to really understand what is the solution vs a band-aid.
You need to think of the PUB/SUB pattern like a radio. The sender and receiver are both asynchronous. The Publisher will continue to send even if no one is listening. The subscriber will only receive data if it is listening. If the network goes down in the middle, the data will be lost.
You need to understand this in order to design your messages. For example, if you design your messages to be "idempotent", it doesn't matter if you lose data. An example of this would be a status type message. It doesn't matter if you have any of the previous statuses. The latest one is correct and message loss doesn't matter. The benefits to this approach is that you end up with a more robust and performant system. The downsides are when you can't design your messages this way.
Your example includes a type of message that requires no loss. Another type of message would be transactional. For example, if you just sent the deltas of what changed in your system, you would not be able to lose the messages. Database replication is often managed this way which is why db replication is often so fragile. To try to provide guarantees, you need to do a couple things. One thing is to add a persistent cache. Each message sent needs to be logged in the persistent cache. Each message needs to be assigned a unique id (preferably a sequence) so that the clients can determine if they are missing a message. A second socket (ROUTER/REQ) needs to be added for the client to request the missing messages individually. Alternatively, you could just use the secondary socket to request resending over the PUB/SUB. The clients would then all receive the messages again (which works for the multicast version). The clients would ignore the messages they had already seen. NOTE: this follows the MAJORDOMO pattern found in the ZeroMQ guide.
An alternative approach is to create your own broker using the ROUTER/DEALER sockets. When the ROUTER socket saw each DEALER connect, it would store its ID. When the ROUTER needed to send data, it would iterate over all client IDs and publish the message. Each message should contain a sequence so that the client can know what missing messages to request. NOTE: this is a sort of reimplementation of Kafka from linkedin.