Astoria... got the "so what" ... just waiting for the "ah hah"...

So looking at Astoria
very briefly today ... a good starting point is probably Alex James blog and all the linked
posts - and so far I'm left with a "so what" attitude to the
technology releases so far (but it is very early days).



I feel like what's being presented is something I could cobble
together using Dream
and ActiveRecord/NHibernate
or Base4 with a couple of weeks
work at best... I'm probably being a little optimistic though ;o)
Devil is always in the detail... but what's in the wild so far
hasn't made me sit up and take notice, I hope the next couple of
drops will though.



However in the mean time, what does interest me:

  • Standardization of a query scheme... so far I've only seen
    examples of search/get queries.. I'm particularly interested in
    any update related queries... this is where the opportunities for
    doing evil live, and where community input will be vital I think.
  • How does WebDAV fit into the Astoria picture at the
    moment?

  • Astoria SaaS ... I find the idea of being able to design and
    provision REST'ful stores on the web (with my own schema) quite
    intriguing.
    • That said - I'm not sure what I'd do with it, but I still
      want it ;o)

    • And thinking out loud, but besides the obvious uses for
      web/ajax/flash/silverlight fraternity *yawn* - could this
      kind of thing actually give new life to some desktop based
      applications - It could certainly smarten them up a bit, so
      that using the same application on multiple machines (i.e.
      work/home) could optionally give you the same
      experience.




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Things I'd like to know about the DLR, but don't...

Has anyone had a chance to really dig into the DLR??... I've
briefly browsed the source code in IronPython 2.0 for the
Microsoft.Scripting project, it looks promising... but I really
need to sit down and write myself a simple little DSL from
end-to-end to get a handle on it (when I get time, I'll be sure to
post a mini-series on it ;o)



Things I have been wondering though are:

  • Is it possible to decorate dynamic classes with attributes
    yet? (i.e. create say an WCF message class and decorate it with
    [DataMember] attributes dynamically) - no attribute support in
    IronPython 1.x was a problem for Ivan a while ago.

  • Are continuations supported (and how) ?
  • Just how well does the language mixing work... Can I grab an
    instance of an IronPython class and change just a single
    instances methods using features particular to (Iron)Ruby


I'd love to know a few things, but just don't have the time at
the moment to find out right now.



Also I wonder if pushing IronPython & IronRuby into the
mainstream is going to see a surge in interest for projects like
FePy ?  I still
feel the value proposition for a lot of the dynamic languages on
the CLR/DLR is weakened by the fact that the BCL isn't as much fun
to use from a dynamic langauge as the native equivalents for the
ruby or python (or certainly makes it difficult to port python or
ruby knowledge of the managed equivalents) ... I'm sure I could
write a YAML parser in C# that would be "good" - but it's not going
to feel as nice to use as say Why's Syck parser which is built
with dynamic languages in mind.
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Don't call us... and we also wont call you.

Been doing a little WCF today... I augmented a partial message
class on a client with some additional properties, including
this:


private bool _partOfResults = true;

public bool PartOfResults
{
get { return _partOfResults; }
set { _partOfResults = value; }
}



Now I assumed by default the any messages would have
PartOfResults set to true... just like it used to
work with ye olde XmlSerializer ;o)



But actually no ... WCF doesn't invoke the constructor - surprised
I hadn't noticed until now - particularly annoying is of course my
unit tests were passing because I was calling the default
constructor on the message... so first of all I decided to cheat
and just implement the method like this:


private bool _partOfResults;

public bool PartOfResults
{
get { return !_partOfResults; }
set { _partOfResults = !value; }
}


But I didn't like the implications ;o) so I went and actually
looked up how to make it work properly:



[OnDeserialized]
private void InitializeExtraFields(StreamingContext context)
{
_partOfResults = true;
}


Pretty boring ;o) just surprised me because I haven't done much WCF
since it went final.
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Screen Architect on sale now...

DevDefined Ltd. have been working with Screen Architect Ltd and Catch Limited to produce a UI Prototyping add-in for Enterprise Architect (EA) - and we are pleased to see that they made their first public release, with the product now on sale from their website.



For anyone who uses Enterprise Architect, and already does UI modeling within EA, or UI prototyping with another application (or wishes to) - then why not take a look at the Screen Architect's flagship Add-in (there's a 30 day trial available).

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Part 14 - Startable Facility





So this time we're going to have a look at the startable facility (you can find more info on it here in the wiki) - the concept of the startable facility is to ensure that components are started as soon as possible, which translates to as soon as all dependencies are available. 



Effectively what happens is you create a component, and implement a special interface called IStartable, which looks like this and is found in the Castle.Core assembly.


///
/// Interface for components that wish to be started by the container
///

public interface IStartable
{
///
/// Starts this instance.
///

void Start();

///

/// Stops this instance.
///

void Stop();
}



And then the startable facility detects any components registered in the container which implement the IStartable interface and determines if they have any dependencies which still need to be satisfied, if not, then the container will Resolve the component, and start it immediately (by invoking the IStartable.Start method on it) otherwise it's added to a list of services awaiting startup.



From then on, as components are registered in the container the startable facility will check the list of services awating startup, to see if any of them have all their dependencies available now, if so it will then Resolve the service and again invoke IStartable.Start on it.

Now at this point it's worth noting that Start is not executed asynchronously - if you block within the Start method then your container will halt loading the configuration etc. till it completes... be careful not to slow down your container startup too much with slow blocking operations with the Start() method.



So let's get into some code... first off I'm going to create a simple http listening service which is capable of serving up a single file... exciting stuff!



Here's the code:


public class LameHttpFileServer : IStartable
{
private string _path;
private HttpListener _listener;
private Thread _listenerThread;
private ILogger _logger;

public LameHttpFileServer(string prefix, string path)
{
_path = path;
_listener = new HttpListener();
_listener.Prefixes.Add(prefix);
}

public ILogger Logger
{
get
{
if (_logger == null) _logger = NullLogger.Instance;
return _logger;
}
set { _logger = value; }
}

public void Start()
{
Logger.Debug("Starting LameWebService...");
_listener.Start();
_listenerThread = new Thread(RequestWorker);
_listenerThread.Start();
Logger.Info("LameWebService Started.");
}

public void Stop()
{
Logger.Debug("Stopping LameWebService...");
_listenerThread.Abort();
_listener.Stop();
Logger.Info("Stopped LameWebService.");
}

private void RequestWorker()
{
while (true)
{
HttpListenerContext context = null;

try
{
context = _listener.GetContext();
}
catch (ObjectDisposedException)
{
return;
}

ServeContent(context.Response, _path);
}
}

private void ServeContent(HttpListenerResponse response, string path)
{
string content = File.ReadAllText(path);
byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(content);
response.ContentLength64 = buffer.Length;

Stream output = response.OutputStream;
output.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
output.Close();
}
}



Now, this class doesn't have any constructor dependencies (beyond a little configuration) but we do have a Setter dependency on an ILogger service - ILogger is actually a generic abstract of a logger for a logging framework (a logger being a named/scoped class supporting a number of generic message writing methods) out of the box Castle provides support for both nlog and log4net, however it also contains some lightweight loggers, such as a console logger, which means you can avoid having to write any logging configuration files... so we're going to use that this time... because the loggers are assigned by the container, there's not need to actually reference the type the logger is logging "for", because the container knows that implicitly.



Now let's have a look at the container configuration:




type="Castle.Windsor.Configuration.AppDomain.CastleSectionHandler, Castle.Windsor" />




type="Castle.Facilities.Startable.StartableFacility, Castle.MicroKernel" />


type="Castle.Facilities.Logging.LoggingFacility, Castle.Facilities.Logging"
loggingApi="console" />



type="IoC.Tutorials.Part14.LameHttpFileServer, IoC.Tutorials.Part14">

http://*:8089/ lame.html





As you can see we have declared two facilities, one for handling the auto-wiring of Loggers into any components with ILogger constructor parameters or setter dependencies, and secondly the startable facility, which will take care of automatically starting our LameHttpFileServer for us.



Now, notice we're referencing a file called lame.html - heres what that looks like:



Lame.html

Welcome to lame.html file

This is the contents of the lame.html file, neat huh?






Now done to business, let's look at the program that's using this server...


private static void Main(string[] args)
{
WindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer(new XmlInterpreter());

GetPage();

container.Dispose();

GetPage();

Console.Read();
}

private static void GetPage()
{
Console.WriteLine("rnClient: requesting http://localhost:8089/ ...");
try
{
WebClient client = new WebClient();
string content = client.DownloadString("http://localhost:8089/");
Console.WriteLine("Client: success, content follows.rnrn {0}", content);
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Client: Exception occured, message: {0}", ex.Message);
}
}



As you can see what we're doing is:


  1. Constructing the container using the configuration.
  2. Calling the GetPage method, which will attempt to download the lame.html file from our server (which the container should have started automatically for us)
  3. Disposing of the container (any guesses what that will do?)
  4. And finally calling the GetPage method again, to see if our server is still running.

So, running the program gives us these results:



[Debug] 'IoC.Tutorials.Part14.LameHttpFileServer' Starting LameWebService...

[Info] 'IoC.Tutorials.Part14.LameHttpFileServer' LameWebService
Started.



Client: requesting http://localhost:8089/ ...

Client: success, content follows.



 

   

       

Lame.html



       

Welcome to
lame.html file



       

This is the
contents of the lame.html file, neat huh?



   





[Debug] 'IoC.Tutorials.Part14.LameHttpFileServer' Stopping
LameWebService...

[Info] 'IoC.Tutorials.Part14.LameHttpFileServer' Stopped
LameWebService.



Client: requesting http://localhost:8089/ ...

Client: Exception occurred, message: Unable to connect to the
remote server


As you can see before we disposed of the container our request for the file worked just fine, but after the container had been disposed, it appears the file service has been stopped, and so our client was unable to connect... what caused this?



Well the way the startable service is implemented, it actually applies a couple of lifecycle concerns - a concern is effectively a bit of code that executes when what it's concerned in occurs, in these case the startable facility adds two concerns to a startable component's model.



The first "concern" is a commission concern, which invokes the Start method upon the component entering the commission step of it's lifecycle, which is immediately after the component instance has been constructed and all it's dependencies and configuration injected. 



The second concern is a "decommission" concern, which occurs upon the component is being decommissioned (ie. disposed of, released or purged from the container) this happens to all components the container is holding onto when it is disposed, or when an individual component is released - however in the case of components with a singleton lifestyle, you can't actually release the component prior to disposing of the container (because that would violate the lifestyle) ... so doing something like this:


LameHttpFileServer server = container.Resolve();
container.Release(server);


In place of disposing the container won't stop the service if it's
a singleton....



One last though - what would happen if we changed our components lifestyle to [Transient] instead of the default of singleton, let's create a simple class for testing this idea:


[Transient]
public class StartableExperiment : IStartable
{
private static int _count;
private int _number;

public StartableExperiment()
{
_number = ++_count;
}

public void Start()
{
Console.WriteLine("Started #{0}", _number);
}

public void Stop()
{
Console.WriteLine("Stopped #{0}", _number);
}
}



Now let's write some code to test it... we'll just register the component in code, to avoid having to change our config...



Here's the program itself...


WindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer(new XmlInterpreter());

container.AddComponent("exp", typeof(StartableExperiment));

StartableExperiment exp1 = container.Resolve();
container.Release(exp1);
StartableExperiment exp2 = container.Resolve();
container.Release(exp2);

container.Dispose();



And the results:



Started #1

Started #2

Stopped #2

Started #3

Stopped #3

Stopped #1




So what's happened is that immediately upon registration a component is created... and can't be disposed (because we can't get a hold of the instance to release it) until the container is disposed... but for the couple of calls to Resolve and Release you can see the StartableExperiment instances are started & stopped during commission & decommission steps in the components life cycle as expected.



So that brings this look at the startable facility to an end... next time we might have another quick look at life cycles to see how else we can use this concept when build components, and maybe after that we'll have a look at some of other lifestyles which are available "out of the box" and how to write our own.
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