EventMachine Examples

2009-11-02

I needed to create a simple, but IO-intensive, thumbnailing service for OneSpot last week. This service acts as a proxy to S3 and so a blocking implementation would not scale well, even if threaded. I wanted to use EventMachine instead. Lessons learned:

• The programming model is a mind twist and takes a long time to understand. The sprinkling of implementation at various layers makes it harder. I’ve spent several days now reading through EventMachine, Thin, Rack and em-http-request source code.
• There’s no non-trivial examples out there. It seems like every example is 10 lines of “Hello World” code with no samples of how to integrate multiple pieces. Ok, here’s a 10 line async web server. Now how do I integrate an async call to the DB? How do I make an async 3rd party web service call?
• There’s no testing support. No libraries for doing async testing and no best practices or suggestions on how to test.

So how can we make things better rather than just complain? I’m going to show you a non-trivial example. In return, I want you to send me more examples. Evented is my new Github repository for EventMachine examples. The first example is that big chunk of code that I puzzled over for the last few days which implements the thumbnailing service using Thin, S3, image_science and em-http-request. But I want more examples and I’d love to hear ideas on how to test this type of code. Leave a comment, send a pull request, and help me help you!