April Meeting - Plack/PSGI Fundamentals

Ben Bixby gave fairly technical talk on a Plack handler/server that he put together for his $work. It started with PSGI/Plack fundamentals then dove down into the details of his custom webserver including C/XS code.

Here are the files from the Plack talk. Comm::Express is a Plack handler he wrote to meet the needs of an application at $work.

Some questions that came up were (and his opinion/answer):

Q: What's the purpose of plack in relation to existing web frameworks.
A: Allow code written for those frameworks to seamlessly run on any number of servers.

Q: Why write applications in Plack directly and not in Catalyst/Dancer/Mojo/Web::Simple.

A: Not really the Right Thing, just how I roll. Made possible by the existence of Plack::Middleware.

Q: Will Comm::Express be released to CPAN.
A: Not planning on it. If you have an application that you think could benefit from it's particular qualities, let me know.

In addition to HTTPParser::MMAP::XS, I also wrote HTTPParser::XS (very poorly named on both counts) that is just the HTTP streaming/http-parser integration without the MMAP stuff which I find quite useful in my day-to-day duties.

Here are the slides and example code