Simple daemon which can speak and listen

Hi all. According to you, what could be the more sexy way to write a
simple Ruby daemon (version 1.9 :)) which can speak and listen in the
same time on a socket (UDP in my case)?

Thanks,
Sai

sock = UDPSocket.new
Thread.new do
sock.write(“some string”)
end
puts sock.read

However, does it really need to be at the same time? can it not just
take turns? If you’re trying to do two things at the same time on the
same object, it suggests you need two objects. Just a thought

Sai Hl wrote:

Hi all. According to you, what could be the more sexy way to write a
simple Ruby daemon (version 1.9 :)) which can speak and listen in the
same time on a socket (UDP in my case)?

Thanks,
Sai

.

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Sai Hl wrote:

Hi all. According to you, what could be the more sexy way to write a
simple Ruby daemon (version 1.9 :)) which can speak and listen in the
same time on a socket (UDP in my case)?

More sexy than what - have you written something already? If so, post it
and we’ll look.

Docs you need:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/socket/rdoc/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/lib_network.html

The first of these is unfortunately incomplete, e.g. UDPSocket#send is
missing. However the second has everything you need under the UDPSocket
header.

A normal UDP server would typically have a loop where it waits for a
message, processes it, and then sends back a response to the sender.
e.g.

require ‘socket’
sock = UDPSocket.new
sock.bind(Socket.gethostname, 12345)
loop do
packet, sender = sock.recvfrom(1500)
response = “hello #{packet}”
sock.send response, 0, sender[3], sender[1]
end

Test like this in another window:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require ‘socket’
=> true
irb(main):002:0> s = UDPSocket.new
=> #UDPSocket:0xb7d5adec
irb(main):003:0> s.connect Socket.gethostname, 12345
=> 0
irb(main):004:0> s.send “world”, 0
=> 5
irb(main):005:0> s.recvfrom(1500)
=> [“hello world”, [“AF_INET”, 12345, “example.com”, “192.0.2.1”]]

There’s nothing to stop you sending out packets asynchronously on the
same UDPSocket though, if you want to, and this can even be done in
another thread.

So if the processing of one particular packet might take a variable
amount of time, and you still want to receive and process other packets
in the mean time, you could do something like this (untested):


sock.bind(Socket.gethostname, 12345)
loop do
d1, d2 = sock.recvfrom
Thread.new(d1, d2) do |packet, sender|
… process ‘packet’
… use sock.send to send the response to ‘sender’
end
end

Note the use of arguments in Thread.new(…) to pass copies of the local
variables to the thread. If you used d1 and d2 directly, you’d find that
they changed as soon as another packet was received in the main loop,
which leads to some nasty bugs when packets arrive at a fast rate.

So it’s probably safer to write it like this:

Thread.new(*sock.recvfrom) do |packet, sender|
… etc
end

Setting Thread.abort_on_exception = true is helpful when debugging this
sort of code, otherwise when an exception occurs in the thread it just
dies silently.

HTH,

Brian.

On 26 Feb 2009, at 22:15, Sai Hl wrote:

Hi all. According to you, what could be the more sexy way to write a
simple Ruby daemon (version 1.9 :)) which can speak and listen in the
same time on a socket (UDP in my case)?

Thanks,
Sai

Follow the link in my sig and you’ll find a couple of presentations
with examples of all kinds of Ruby socket fun, covering both UDP and
TCP. They also include lots of code which may or may not be fit for
production purposes :slight_smile:

Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net

raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason

Totaly awsome :o
Thank you all!