Creating A Single Threaded Server with AnyEvent (Perl) - perl

Question

I'm working on creating a local service to listen on localhost and provide a basic call and response type interface. What I'd like to start with is a baby server that you can connect to over telnet and echoes what it receives.
I've heard AnyEvent is great for this, but the documentation for AnyEvent::Socket does not give a very good example how to do this. I'd like to build this with AnyEvent, AnyEvent::Socket and AnyEvent::Handle.
Right now the little server code looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::Handle;
use AnyEvent::Socket;
my $cv = AnyEvent->condvar;
my $host = '127.0.0.1';
my $port = 44244;
tcp_server($host, $port, sub {
my($fh) = #_;
my $cv = AnyEvent->condvar;
my $handle;
$handle = AnyEvent::Handle->new(
fh => $fh,
poll => "r",
on_read => sub {
my($self) = #_;
print "Received: " . $self->rbuf . "\n";
$cv->send;
}
);
$cv->recv;
});
print "Listening on $host\n";
$cv->wait;
This doesn't work and also if I telnet to localhost:44244 I get this:
EV: error in callback (ignoring): AnyEvent::CondVar:
recursive blocking wait attempted at server.pl line 29.
I think if I understand how to make a small single threaded server that I can connect to over telnet and prints out whatever its given and then waits for more input, I could take it a lot further from there. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You're blocking inside a callback. That's not allowed. There are a few ways to handle this. My preference is to launch a Coro thread from within the tcp_server callback. But without Coro, something like this might be what you're looking for:
#!/usr/bin/env perl5.16.2
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::Handle;
use AnyEvent::Socket;
my $cv = AE::cv;
my $host = '127.0.0.1';
my $port = 44244;
my %connections;
tcp_server(
$host, $port, sub {
my ($fh) = #_;
print "Connected...\n";
my $handle;
$handle = AnyEvent::Handle->new(
fh => $fh,
poll => 'r',
on_read => sub {
my ($self) = #_;
print "Received: " . $self->rbuf . "\n";
},
on_eof => sub {
my ($hdl) = #_;
$hdl->destroy();
},
);
$connections{$handle} = $handle; # keep it alive.
return;
});
print "Listening on $host\n";
$cv->recv;
Note that I'm only waiting on one condvar. And I'm storing the handles to keep the AnyEvent::Handle objects alive longer. Work to clean up the $self->rbuf is left as an excersise for the reader :-)
Question cross-posted, answer, too :-)

Answer 2

I have heard good things about AnyEvent as well, but have not used it. I wrote a small nonblocking server in the past using IO::Select. There is an example in the documentation for that module (I've added a few lines):
use IO::Select;
use IO::Socket;
$lsn = new IO::Socket::INET(Listen => 1, LocalPort => 8080);
$sel = new IO::Select( $lsn );
while(#ready = $sel->can_read) {
foreach $fh (#ready) {
if($fh == $lsn) {
# Create a new socket
$new = $lsn->accept;
$sel->add($new);
}
else {
# Process socket
my $input = <$fh>;
print $fh "Hello there. You said: $input\n";
# Maybe we have finished with the socket
$sel->remove($fh);
$fh->close;
}
}
}

Answer 3

I'm not sure what your condvar is trying to trigger there. Use it to send state, like:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::Handle;
use AnyEvent::Socket;
my $host = '127.0.0.1';
my $port = 44244;
my $exit = AnyEvent->condvar;
tcp_server($host, $port, sub {
my($fh) = #_;
my $handle; $handle = AnyEvent::Handle->new(
fh => $fh,
poll => "r",
on_read => sub {
my($self) = #_;
print "Received: " . $self->rbuf . "\n";
if ($self->rbuf eq 'exit') {
$exit->send;
}
}
);
});
print "Listening on $host\n";
$exit->recv;