About a year ago, I bought myself a Lenovo ThinkPad (T500). Because I had been working at Google from 2005-2009 and my work laptop was sufficient for surfing the Web while at home, my last personal laptop purchase was in 2004 when I bought an IBM ThinkPad (T42). I loved my ThinkPad, as I spent many hours of quality time with it implementing my Master's thesis at MIT.
Therefore, when it came time to buy a new machine in 2009, I decided to look at ThinkPads. Yes, I had heard that the quality of the ThinkPad had dropped considerably ever since Lenovo had taken things over from IBM. Yes, all my friends were developing on Macs, but I found them to be irritating to type on and my primary development applications (Google Chrome and Eclipse) felt slow on OS X. And yes, Windows has more than its share of annoyances. At the time, ThinkPads were shipping with Vista (arguably one of the worst Windows releases ever), but they came with a voucher for a free copy of Windows 7, which was reported to be a substantial improvement.
After weighing all of my options, I decided to save some cash and buck the trend of my contemporaries: I chose to be a PC instead of a Mac.
From the abysmal experience of making my online purchase of a Lenovo ThinkPad, I should have known that my experience with the machine itself would also be a disaster. The Lenovo web site was slow and failed to communicate what I was buying. I inadvertently bought a machine with a 32-bit processor (I still don't know why any new machine in the fall of 2009 would not be 64-bit), which could not take advantage of the 4GB of RAM that I paid for. (Searching online forums, I do not appear to be the only one who has made this mistake.) Further, it took two to three weeks to get my laptop. If I had decided to buy a Mac, I could have just walked to the Apple store and had one in my hot little hands that day.
Then there was Vista. Vista makes me angry. Sometimes when my laptop goes to sleep, it also turns off the wireless radio and fails to turn it back on when the machine wakes up. Sometimes the physical buttons to control the volume of the laptop fail to communicate with Vista. (Being unable to control the volume of your computer can be an embarrassing experience.) Sometimes the built-in video camera works, sometimes it doesn't, but either way, rebooting (the go-to solution for any Windows user) is an unreliable fix for the problem. The DVD drive is also finicky, as it inexplicably pops open from time to time. Overall, this is a horrible experience.
But hey, what about that Windows 7 voucher? Apparently you had to redeem it by calling Lenovo customer support after Windows 7 was officially released, which was several weeks after I got my ThinkPad. "Call Lenovo" sat near the bottom of my to-do list for months (who is eager to call customer support?), so by the time I made time to call Lenovo, they told me that my voucher had expired. I complained and they said they would speak to someone and contact me with a response, but they never did.
After all of this, I was incredibly unhappy with my ThinkPad. I wanted to try to put Linux on it, but I had a number of speaking engagements coming up where I was going to present from my laptop, so it did not seem prudent to wipe my machine before embarking on a series of talks. Though even after my speaking series was over, it was hard to find the time to sit down and install Linux. I had never done it by myself before, and I wanted to take the time to read up on it so I could understand what I was doing and have a backup plan in case I was unsuccessful and needed to revert back.
This year, on Christmas Day, I decided to just go for it and install Ubuntu on my ThinkPad. I copied the .iso onto a USB stick, wedged it in the side of my ThinkPad, and rebooted. I hit F1 to change the bootloader to run off the USB stick and made it to the Ubuntu installation screen. I spent a bit of time playing with options to repartition my hard disk so that I could preserve Vista and my files in case I needed to get them back (for me, this has always been the most confusing part when trying to step through a Linux installation), but I got fed up and decided that all of my important data was in the cloud (which includes Mercurial and SVN repos on other machines) and that I had no desire to go back to Vista anyway, so I decided to dedicate the entire hard disk to Ubuntu and abandon Vista forever.
When I decided to blow away my operating system, I knew that it would likely be a rash decision that I would pay for later, but so far, it has been FREAKING AWESOME! The physical volume buttons on the ThinkPad just work. The Google Talk plugin for Linux also just works. And instead of the dual, competing gaudy wireless managers in Vista (one provided by Windows and the other provided by Lenovo), there is now a single, simple icon/dropdown interface in the toolbar to select a wireless network, just like on OS X.
Using my laptop is now enjoyable again. It feels like I got a brand new machine, so even though I didn't manage to get the new computer that I really wanted for Christmas, this certainly seems like the next best thing.
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!
Monday, December 27, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Slides from MIT Talk
Last week, I gave two talks about Closure in Cambridge: one at Google and the other at MIT CSAIL. I had a great time and fielded lots of good questions from sharp individuals, so I'm looking forward to my next two speaking events in New York City.
As someone requested that I upload my slides, I am more than happy to share them:
I would argue that one of the best parts of the talk is the plovr demo, which sadly is not communicated through the slides. Though if you are in the NYC area, you can come and see such a demo live if you come to one of my upcoming talks! Also, O'Reilly provides me with three copies of my book to give away at each event, so even if you aren't interested in plovr, you are probably interested in the chance to win a free book! (Though I am embarrassed to admit that I don't have the hang of how to run a "giveaway" yet, so at the MIT talk, I ended up giving books to those who hung out the longest to ask questions.)
Though after spending quite a bit of time preparing my talks last week, I am pretty disappointed with my experience creating a presentation with Google Docs. Given that the UI is displayed using HTML and CSS, it should be dead simple to change the color palette of a presentation. For example, I am generally interested in three styles: slide title, plain text, and sample code. Every time I want to set text as sample code, I have to select the text, choose "Courier New" from the font dropdown and then select my code color from the font color picker. Under the hood, there are tons of
Trying to use different themes for Google and MIT for the same presentation would have taken hours because of all the time mousing around to select text and change all the styles, so I didn't even try. I know that Google Docs is nowhere near Keynote or Powerpoint in terms of its feature set, but I didn't realize how far behind it is. It only comes with 15 themes, and I'd argue that none of them are particularly good for a developer who wants to display code samples. I would switch to a Microsoft or an Apple solution, but I am often switching between computers, and the thought of emailing a slide deck around and clogging my inbox with twenty versions of the same presentation is depressing.
There's a good chance that I'll build my own lightweight presentation editor in HTML that is tailored for creating talks by software engineers. I basically had to do something similar in order to write my book, but that's an exciting topic for a future blog post!
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!
As someone requested that I upload my slides, I am more than happy to share them:
I would argue that one of the best parts of the talk is the plovr demo, which sadly is not communicated through the slides. Though if you are in the NYC area, you can come and see such a demo live if you come to one of my upcoming talks! Also, O'Reilly provides me with three copies of my book to give away at each event, so even if you aren't interested in plovr, you are probably interested in the chance to win a free book! (Though I am embarrassed to admit that I don't have the hang of how to run a "giveaway" yet, so at the MIT talk, I ended up giving books to those who hung out the longest to ask questions.)
Though after spending quite a bit of time preparing my talks last week, I am pretty disappointed with my experience creating a presentation with Google Docs. Given that the UI is displayed using HTML and CSS, it should be dead simple to change the color palette of a presentation. For example, I am generally interested in three styles: slide title, plain text, and sample code. Every time I want to set text as sample code, I have to select the text, choose "Courier New" from the font dropdown and then select my code color from the font color picker. Under the hood, there are tons of
<div>s with the same inline CSS styles whereas if I created my slides by hand in HTML, I would have many <code> tags that could easily be restyled with a single CSS rule.Trying to use different themes for Google and MIT for the same presentation would have taken hours because of all the time mousing around to select text and change all the styles, so I didn't even try. I know that Google Docs is nowhere near Keynote or Powerpoint in terms of its feature set, but I didn't realize how far behind it is. It only comes with 15 themes, and I'd argue that none of them are particularly good for a developer who wants to display code samples. I would switch to a Microsoft or an Apple solution, but I am often switching between computers, and the thought of emailing a slide deck around and clogging my inbox with twenty versions of the same presentation is depressing.
There's a good chance that I'll build my own lightweight presentation editor in HTML that is tailored for creating talks by software engineers. I basically had to do something similar in order to write my book, but that's an exciting topic for a future blog post!
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Upcoming Talks
Over the next couple of months, I will be giving several talks about Closure:
October 13: Getting the most out of Closure
Google: Cambridge, MA
October 15: Building a 100K LOC JavaScript application with Google Closure
MIT CSAIL: Cambridge, MA
October 27: Introduction to Closure Tools and plovr
Google: New York, NY (as part of the NYC-GTUG Meetup)
November 10: Compiling your web site: Closure compiler
Location TBA: New York, NY (as part of the Web Performance NY Meetup)
If you are in the area for any of these talks, please come and say hello! I'm also more than happy to sign books (and may even be giving some away!) at each of these talks.
Hopefully, I will also get a chance to speak at both the Boston and NYC JavaScript meetups. I also hope to make it out to the Bay Area, Austin, Chicago, and Sydney (where I seem to have an open invitation!). As I have no official "book tour," my personal travel basically determines when and where I set up speaking events.
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!
October 13: Getting the most out of Closure
Google: Cambridge, MA
October 15: Building a 100K LOC JavaScript application with Google Closure
MIT CSAIL: Cambridge, MA
October 27: Introduction to Closure Tools and plovr
Google: New York, NY (as part of the NYC-GTUG Meetup)
November 10: Compiling your web site: Closure compiler
Location TBA: New York, NY (as part of the Web Performance NY Meetup)
If you are in the area for any of these talks, please come and say hello! I'm also more than happy to sign books (and may even be giving some away!) at each of these talks.
Hopefully, I will also get a chance to speak at both the Boston and NYC JavaScript meetups. I also hope to make it out to the Bay Area, Austin, Chicago, and Sydney (where I seem to have an open invitation!). As I have no official "book tour," my personal travel basically determines when and where I set up speaking events.
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Creating a 100K LOC Application in JavaScript with Closure and plovr
Last night at an MIT infosession for Yext, I presented some statistics about the codebase for Yext Rep, which is our free, online reputation management system for local businesses. Rep is a substantial Rich Internet Application (RIA), topping out at just over 144K lines of JavaScript and Closure Templates, which amounts to over 4MB of JavaScript. In the spirit of a traditional RIA, Rep is a single web page that dynamically loads both code and data via AJAX (navigation state is stored in the URL fragment, just like in Gmail).
The first challenge in writing a 100K LOC JavaScript application is managing the codebase. Fortunately, the Closure Library provides both a comprehensive API and a meaningful way to organize dependencies in JavaScript. By using thoughtful namespaces and explicit dependencies, it is easy to find the functionality you are looking for and to build things up without creating cyclical dependencies.
The second challenge, of course, is getting the application to load quickly even though there is 4380K of JavaScript to send down to the browser. Any solution that would prevent Rep from loading quickly would not be an option. As you may have guessed, leveraging Closure makes it possible for us to reduce that 4380K down to 73K, which is less than 2% of the original size. Here is how it breaks down:
One of the less commonly known techniques that we use is dividing JavaScript into modules. This is a feature of the Closure Compiler, but using plovr makes the module splitting feature of the Compiler far more accessible and manageable. Over the weekend, I worked on improving module support in plovr. There are still a few bugs left to shake out, but I plan to do another release of plovr with more detailed documentation on modules soon.
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to leverage Closure to create your own RIA!
The first challenge in writing a 100K LOC JavaScript application is managing the codebase. Fortunately, the Closure Library provides both a comprehensive API and a meaningful way to organize dependencies in JavaScript. By using thoughtful namespaces and explicit dependencies, it is easy to find the functionality you are looking for and to build things up without creating cyclical dependencies.
The second challenge, of course, is getting the application to load quickly even though there is 4380K of JavaScript to send down to the browser. Any solution that would prevent Rep from loading quickly would not be an option. As you may have guessed, leveraging Closure makes it possible for us to reduce that 4380K down to 73K, which is less than 2% of the original size. Here is how it breaks down:
| KB | Technique |
|---|---|
| 4380 | Original JavaScript |
| 709 | Compilation using the Advanced mode of the Closure Compiler (84% reduction) |
| 215 | Dividing the compiled code into modules using plovr (70% reduction) |
| 73 | gzip (66% reduction) |
One of the less commonly known techniques that we use is dividing JavaScript into modules. This is a feature of the Closure Compiler, but using plovr makes the module splitting feature of the Compiler far more accessible and manageable. Over the weekend, I worked on improving module support in plovr. There are still a few bugs left to shake out, but I plan to do another release of plovr with more detailed documentation on modules soon.
Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to leverage Closure to create your own RIA!
Monday, September 27, 2010
Give a man a fish or teach a man to fish?
Ostensibly, Closure: The Definitive Guide is a book about Closure, a suite of JavaScript tools from Google, but I tried to make it about more than that. It also discusses some of the more subtle aspects of JavaScript, examines the clever aspects of Closure’s design, and espouses best practices for software engineering. That last point is of particular importance to me, because as I explain in the preface, I expect the size of JavaScript codebases to grow quickly in the coming years (if not sooner), and developers will need Closure (or something like it) in order to do JavaScript programming “in the large.”
Therefore, even if you have adamantly committed yourself to jQuery, I think you will learn a lot from this book. As some members of the jQuery community have already begun to concede, jQuery is not the right solution for large software projects. Perhaps jQuery will reach a point where it is redesigned for writing more complex applications, and if it does, I certainly hope it looks to Closure for guidance. If one wants to build something that rivals Gmail or Google Maps in frontend sophistication and performance, then why not look to the toolkit that made those products possible and learn from the design decisions that shaped it?
An alternative interpretation of Closure: The Definitive Guide is that it is just a braindump of everything I learned about web development while at Google. As I chose to spend four years at Google rather than in a PhD program, I often think of the book as my dissertation (though unlike a doctoral thesis, someone will actually read it -- zing!). However, the analogy does not quite fit, as I cannot claim Closure to be a product of my own research. At Google, I was far more often a consumer of Closure than a producer. Yet in the course of writing the book, the balance has shifted, and I have found more time to submit patches, file bug reports, and build tools on top of Closure such as plovr. I think that it was only until I had really gotten into writing the book that I could fully appreciate the entire toolkit and confidently contribute back to all areas of it, knowing that my contributions would be consistent with its underlying principles.
Which brings me to the title of this blog post: Give a man a fish or teach a man to fish? In a world filled with O’Reilly cookbooks and Stack Overflow articles, I often see developers focused on consuming the information that helps them fix the issue that they are currently debugging and then moving on to the next problem. The drawback of this approach is that when that developer encounters a problem that no one has blogged about, he is stuck. Because the Web has always given him fish, he has no idea how to fish when Google cannot find the answer.
For this reason, Closure: The Definitive Guide aims to be a “teach a man to fish” type of book. When I think about my favorite technical books, such as Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, they are the ones that discuss principles as well as practice. When you have the correct mental model for a tool or programming language, it is possible to exploit that knowledge to solve new problems. By comparison, if you limit yourself to solutions that are pasted on message boards, then by definition, you will never be solving problems that have not been solved before (how boring!). Rest assured that at 550 pages, Closure: The Definitive Guide contains plenty of code samples and other practical information, but it also does its best to explain the problems that Closure is designed to solve and why the tools work the way they do.
The book also touches upon other areas related to web development. As mentioned earlier, I care a lot about software engineering, so I include a surprisingly large discussion of Ant, as I believe it is incredibly important to have scripts for automating common tasks (it is not important that they be written in Ant, just that they exist). I even went so far as to create plovr (which is introduced in Appendix C) because I did not feel that the edit-reload-test cycle that one gets out of the box with Closure was fast enough. The book also contains other such “digressions,” such as the section on goog.partial() that goes into considerable detail about function currying and the scope of a closure. In other parts of the book, you will find short asides on security vulnerabilities such as XSS and XSRF (which gave me an excuse to include Exploits of a Mom on page 76!).
In sum, Closure: The Definitive Guide aims to be much more than a manual. (The last thing I wanted to do was produce a tome that was a rehash of documentation that was already freely available online.) Instead, it tries to explain the tools and principles that you need to build a rich web application in JavaScript while demonstrating how Closure employs those principles to be the best tool for the job. If you find that your latest web project is starting to collapse under its own weight, then perhaps it’s time you decided to learn what Closure is all about.
Therefore, even if you have adamantly committed yourself to jQuery, I think you will learn a lot from this book. As some members of the jQuery community have already begun to concede, jQuery is not the right solution for large software projects. Perhaps jQuery will reach a point where it is redesigned for writing more complex applications, and if it does, I certainly hope it looks to Closure for guidance. If one wants to build something that rivals Gmail or Google Maps in frontend sophistication and performance, then why not look to the toolkit that made those products possible and learn from the design decisions that shaped it?
An alternative interpretation of Closure: The Definitive Guide is that it is just a braindump of everything I learned about web development while at Google. As I chose to spend four years at Google rather than in a PhD program, I often think of the book as my dissertation (though unlike a doctoral thesis, someone will actually read it -- zing!). However, the analogy does not quite fit, as I cannot claim Closure to be a product of my own research. At Google, I was far more often a consumer of Closure than a producer. Yet in the course of writing the book, the balance has shifted, and I have found more time to submit patches, file bug reports, and build tools on top of Closure such as plovr. I think that it was only until I had really gotten into writing the book that I could fully appreciate the entire toolkit and confidently contribute back to all areas of it, knowing that my contributions would be consistent with its underlying principles.
Which brings me to the title of this blog post: Give a man a fish or teach a man to fish? In a world filled with O’Reilly cookbooks and Stack Overflow articles, I often see developers focused on consuming the information that helps them fix the issue that they are currently debugging and then moving on to the next problem. The drawback of this approach is that when that developer encounters a problem that no one has blogged about, he is stuck. Because the Web has always given him fish, he has no idea how to fish when Google cannot find the answer.
For this reason, Closure: The Definitive Guide aims to be a “teach a man to fish” type of book. When I think about my favorite technical books, such as Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, they are the ones that discuss principles as well as practice. When you have the correct mental model for a tool or programming language, it is possible to exploit that knowledge to solve new problems. By comparison, if you limit yourself to solutions that are pasted on message boards, then by definition, you will never be solving problems that have not been solved before (how boring!). Rest assured that at 550 pages, Closure: The Definitive Guide contains plenty of code samples and other practical information, but it also does its best to explain the problems that Closure is designed to solve and why the tools work the way they do.
The book also touches upon other areas related to web development. As mentioned earlier, I care a lot about software engineering, so I include a surprisingly large discussion of Ant, as I believe it is incredibly important to have scripts for automating common tasks (it is not important that they be written in Ant, just that they exist). I even went so far as to create plovr (which is introduced in Appendix C) because I did not feel that the edit-reload-test cycle that one gets out of the box with Closure was fast enough. The book also contains other such “digressions,” such as the section on goog.partial() that goes into considerable detail about function currying and the scope of a closure. In other parts of the book, you will find short asides on security vulnerabilities such as XSS and XSRF (which gave me an excuse to include Exploits of a Mom on page 76!).
In sum, Closure: The Definitive Guide aims to be much more than a manual. (The last thing I wanted to do was produce a tome that was a rehash of documentation that was already freely available online.) Instead, it tries to explain the tools and principles that you need to build a rich web application in JavaScript while demonstrating how Closure employs those principles to be the best tool for the job. If you find that your latest web project is starting to collapse under its own weight, then perhaps it’s time you decided to learn what Closure is all about.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Is Your Book Published Yet?
Over the past few months, I have often been asked: “When is your book going to be published?” In today’s world, that is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
For example, shortly after the book went to print, the electronic version of the final draft became available for purchase on O’Reilly’s web site (while simultaneously appearing on O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts page, implying that it is not yet complete). According to Amazon, the publication date is September 27, though it is unclear whether that is when Amazon pre-orders will be shipped or when they will be received (or neither!). As if my eagerness had not already gotten the best of my patience, my editors at O’Reilly explained to me that the book will not appear in brick-and-mortar bookstores until two to three weeks after Amazon has it!
So for myself, I decided to consider my book “published” as soon as I had a physical copy in my own hot little hands, which finally graced my doorstep today:
If you need me, I’ll be at home spilling champagne on my new book!
Update: I stopped by the Union Square Barnes and Noble in NYC and they said that they should have Closure: The Definitive Guide in stock on Tuesday. Also, sometime in the last couple of days, Amazon changed from taking pre-orders to declaring the book "In Stock," so perhaps 9/27 is a real date for both online and brick-and-mortar sales!
For example, shortly after the book went to print, the electronic version of the final draft became available for purchase on O’Reilly’s web site (while simultaneously appearing on O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts page, implying that it is not yet complete). According to Amazon, the publication date is September 27, though it is unclear whether that is when Amazon pre-orders will be shipped or when they will be received (or neither!). As if my eagerness had not already gotten the best of my patience, my editors at O’Reilly explained to me that the book will not appear in brick-and-mortar bookstores until two to three weeks after Amazon has it!
So for myself, I decided to consider my book “published” as soon as I had a physical copy in my own hot little hands, which finally graced my doorstep today:
If you need me, I’ll be at home spilling champagne on my new book!
Update: I stopped by the Union Square Barnes and Noble in NYC and they said that they should have Closure: The Definitive Guide in stock on Tuesday. Also, sometime in the last couple of days, Amazon changed from taking pre-orders to declaring the book "In Stock," so perhaps 9/27 is a real date for both online and brick-and-mortar sales!
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Using Soy instead of PHP or JSP
Traditionally, I have used PHP to create the basic template for bolinfest.com, but I never felt good about it. The mixture of presentation and content made my PHP files hard to organize, and having my URLs end in
Nevertheless, PHP was dead simple to setup with Apache on Linux, and it was a convenient way to include a standard header and footer, along with a little logic to highlight the navigation tab for the page that was currently being displayed. At the same time, I found it annoying to duplicate the setup on Windows, which meant that I often ended up editing the files directly on the server rather than developing locally, checking into version control, and checking out on the server. It just encouraged bad habits all around.
Fortunately, I eliminated this problem over the weekend by creating a dead simple web server that works with Closure Templates. For now, I'm calling it soyweb (Soy is another name for Closure Templates), and it is available as an experimental feature of plovr. (You can download the latest version of plovr/soyweb from its Google Code site.)
Because Closure Templates are written in Java, so is my web server, which is fairly easy to do with the HttpServer class introduced in Java 1.6. Instead of having to set up a Windows service, I can run the following command to serve a directory of Soy files as HTML:
A file such as docs.soy is served via both http://plovr.com/docs and http://plovr.com/docs.html. Personally, I have been linking to the version with the
As Soy supports specifying compile time global variables, I have decided to expose this feature via a JSON config file. This appears to be more flexible than Soy's file format for globals, as the config file for soyweb will turn a JSON list into a SoyListData and a JSON map into a SoyMapData. (Currently, comments are not allowed in the config file, but as soon as the fix for bug 212 is released for gson, I will upgrade plovr to allow comments in config files.) The use of globals has already proven useful as I use one set of values when developing locally, and another set of values when developing in production.
By default, soyweb recompiles all Soy files on every request, which is extremely convenient for development. (In reading about node.js, it sounded like I would have to restart Node every time I edited a Soy file, which would be unacceptable for development. Nevertheless, I am very excited about the future of Node, and would love to see more Node/Closure integration down the road.) Obviously, dynamic recompilation is not a good feature for soyweb in production, so there is a
.php was embarrassing (and would be a pain to set up redirects for if I ever wanted to change them).Nevertheless, PHP was dead simple to setup with Apache on Linux, and it was a convenient way to include a standard header and footer, along with a little logic to highlight the navigation tab for the page that was currently being displayed. At the same time, I found it annoying to duplicate the setup on Windows, which meant that I often ended up editing the files directly on the server rather than developing locally, checking into version control, and checking out on the server. It just encouraged bad habits all around.
Fortunately, I eliminated this problem over the weekend by creating a dead simple web server that works with Closure Templates. For now, I'm calling it soyweb (Soy is another name for Closure Templates), and it is available as an experimental feature of plovr. (You can download the latest version of plovr/soyweb from its Google Code site.)
Because Closure Templates are written in Java, so is my web server, which is fairly easy to do with the HttpServer class introduced in Java 1.6. Instead of having to set up a Windows service, I can run the following command to serve a directory of Soy files as HTML:
java -jar plovr.jar soyweb --dir DIRECTORY_OF_SOY_FILESEach Soy file that is served by soyweb must have a template named
.base that does not take any parameters. Currently, plovr.com is being served using soyweb, so you can see the Soy templates that power the web site in the repository.A file such as docs.soy is served via both http://plovr.com/docs and http://plovr.com/docs.html. Personally, I have been linking to the version with the
.html extension, but I can see where it may be desirable to not use any extension at all, so soyweb supports both. In either case, I am no longer exposing the underlying technology used to serve the site via the file extension.As Soy supports specifying compile time global variables, I have decided to expose this feature via a JSON config file. This appears to be more flexible than Soy's file format for globals, as the config file for soyweb will turn a JSON list into a SoyListData and a JSON map into a SoyMapData. (Currently, comments are not allowed in the config file, but as soon as the fix for bug 212 is released for gson, I will upgrade plovr to allow comments in config files.) The use of globals has already proven useful as I use one set of values when developing locally, and another set of values when developing in production.
By default, soyweb recompiles all Soy files on every request, which is extremely convenient for development. (In reading about node.js, it sounded like I would have to restart Node every time I edited a Soy file, which would be unacceptable for development. Nevertheless, I am very excited about the future of Node, and would love to see more Node/Closure integration down the road.) Obviously, dynamic recompilation is not a good feature for soyweb in production, so there is a
--static flag that can be used to disable it. The other flag of interest is --port, which can be used to specify which port soyweb runs on (defaults to 9811), so I use the following command to run soyweb in production to serve plovr.com:java -jar plovr.jar soyweb --dir www --static --globals prod-globals.jsBecause I am running Apache, I had to set up the following proxy from port 80:
ProxyRequests OffBe aware that I produced that by a series of guess-and-check operations while reading the Apache documentation on mod_proxy, so it is quite possible I am not using best practices in that respect.
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / http://plovr.com:9811/
ProxyPassReverse / http://plovr.com:9811/
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