My Haxe Log: Week #2

This week:

• My token one day a week I continued on my Node-Webkit project.  This time I made externs for Kue (externs, which appear to be working) and FFMpeg (externs, not functional just yet).  Still enjoying working with Node-Webkit, and with the Node-API library especially.  Sad I didn’t get to make more progress on it this week.
•  Ufront:
  • Make tracing / logging work reliably between multiple requests. After enabling neko.Web.cacheModule(), I began to find areas where Ufront was not very multiple-request-friendly. These would have surfaced later with a port to Client JS or Node JS, but it’s good to find them now.One problem was that our tracing and logging modules were behaving as if there was only one request at a time. This could result in a trace message for one request ending up being output to somebody else’s request, which is obviously bad.

    The problem is a tricky one, as trace() always translates to haxe.Log.trace(), and you with Ufront’s multiple-request-at-a-time design, you can’t know which request is the current one from a static method. If I think of a clever way to do it, possibly involving cookies and sessions, then I might include a HttpContext.getCurrentContext() static method. This would probably have to be implemented separately for each supported platform.

    The solution for now, however, was to not keep track of log messages in the TraceModule, but in the HttpContext. Then on the onLogRequest event, the trace modules get access to the log messages for the current context, and can output them to the browser, to a file, or whichever they choose.

    The downside is that you have to use httpContext.ufTrace() rather than trace(). I added a shortcut for this in both ufront.web.Controller and ufront.remoting.RemotingApiClass, so that in your controllers or APIs you can call uftrace() and it will be associated with the current request. There is also ufLog, ufWarn and ufError.

    I also made RemotingModule work similarly with tracing and logging – so logs go to both the log file and the remoting call to the browser.

  • Fix logging in ErrorModule. One of the things that made debugging the new ufront really hard was that when there was an Error, the ErrorModule displayed, but the trace messages did not get sent to the browser or the log file. I did a bit of code cleanup and got this working now.
  • Fixed File Sessions / EasyAuth. Once able to get my traces and logs working more consistently, I was able to debug and fix the remaining issues in FileSession, so now EasyAuth is working reliably, which is great.
  • Added Login / Logout for UF-Admin. With UF-Admin, I added a login screen and logout, that works with EasyAuth for now. I guess I will make it pluggable later… For now though it means you can set up a simple website, not worry about auth for the front end, but have the backend password protected. If you use EasyAuth for your website / app, the same session will work on the ufadmin page.
  • Created uf-content for app-generated files. I moved all app-generated files (sessions, logs, temp files etc) into a folder called “uf-content”. Then I made this configurable, and relative to httpContext.request.scriptDirectory. You can configure it by changing the contentDirectory option in your UfrontConfiguration. This will make it easier when deploying, we can have instructions to make that single directory writeable but not accessible via the web, and then everything that requires FileSystem access can work reliably from there.
  • Pushed new versions of the libraries. Now that the basics are working, I pushed new versions of the libraries to Haxelib. They are marked as ufront-* with version 1.0.0-beta.1. From here it will be easy to update them individually and move towards a final release.
  • Demo Blog App. To demonstrate the basics of how it works, and a kind of “best practices” for project structure, I created a demo app, and thought I would start with a blog. I started, and the basic setup is there, including the config structure and each of the controller actions, and the “ufadmin” integration. But it’s not working just yet, needs more work.
  • Identified Hair website. I have a website for a friend’s small business that I’ve been procrastinating working on for a long time. On Saturday I finally got started on it, and set up the basic project and routes in Ufront. In about 4 hours I managed to get the project set up, all the controllers / routes working, all the content in place and a basic responsive design with CSS positioning working. All the data is either HTML, Markdown or Database Models (which get inserted into views). Once I’ve got their branding/graphics included, I’ll use ufront to provide a basic way to change data in their database. And then if they’re lucky, I might look at doing some Facebook integration to show their photo galleries on the site.