maiden-networking

0.0.0

Mixin components to help with common networking tasks in Maiden.

About Maiden-Networking

This module adds support for common networking problems to make implementing a client that has to rely on a remote connection easier.

Classes

We start with remote-client, which adds initiate-connection, close-connection, and client-connected-p that should be implemented to perform the obvious corresponding actions on the client.

Moving on to ip-client, which adds a host and port slot.

Next up there is socket-client, which adds socket and read-thread slots and handle-connection, handle-connection-error, process, receive, and send. It implements client-connected-p, and close-connection. It automatically launches a thread on initiate-connection, which calls handle-connection. This function should loop and call receive to get new information for as long as appropriate and pass it on to process. continue and abort restarts are automatically established around it. It also makes sure that receive and send are locked to avoid threading collisions while sending or receiving. handle-connection-error is invoked if an error within handle-connection is detected. Finally, if handle-connection exits, close-connection is called which takes care of properly cleaning up the thread and calling usocket:socket-close.

After that big stinker, we get reconnecting-client, which adds the failures, max-failures, backoff, and interval slots. It also implements handle-connection-error which should smartly handle problems in the connection by automatically reestablishing it. It does this max-failures times before giving up with a client-reconnection-exceeded-error. Each time interval amount of time is waited, which is increased by backoff. backoff can be one of :constant, :linear, or :exponential.

Next we have a smaller class called timeout-client, adding a timeout and last-received-time slot. Upon receive it updates the last-received-time with the current time, and when handle-connection-idle is invoked, it will test if the timeout is exceeded. If so, a client-timeout-error is signalled.

Moving on there is the text-client, adding an encoding, and buffer field. Since it is a subclass of socket-client it can implement the receive and send functions to handle strings. buffer can be either :line in which case read-line is used, or a string of a fixed length, in which case read-sequence is used.

Now we get to the tcp-client with which come the element-type and idle-interval slots. It implements client-connected-p, initiate-connection, handle-connection, and handle-connection-idle. The handle-connection method will repeatedly wait for input with the idle-interval timeout, after which handle-connection-idle is called until there actually is some input available. If input is available, process is called with the result of receive.

The text-tcp-client is merely a combination of text-client and tcp-client.

Next up we have the tcp-server, which adds a clients slot that keeps a list of known client connections of this server. It also adds the accept and make-tcp-server-client methods, which have standard implementations. By default accept just calls initiate-connection with the result of make-tcp-server-client, which simply constructs an instance of tcp-server-client.

The tcp-server-client is a tcp-client with a server slot, to which it pushes itself upon initialisation. Upon connection closing, it removes itself from the server's clients list again. If you actually do implement a server, you will definitely want to subclass this to implement actually receiving behaviour and override make-tcp-server-client to construct an instance of your subclass instead.

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