Toward a first release in Valum

I’m working on the beta release that should bring minor improvements and more definitive APIs.

• JSON example and documentation with json-glib
• final renaming to ensure a quality and elegant API
• CGI and SCGI implementations

The next step is a stable 0.2.0 release which should happen in the coming weeks.

• RPM packaging and distribution (see Valum on COPR)
• Docker container example using the RPM package

Invocation in the Router context

This feature was missing from the last release and solves the issue of calling next when performing asynchronous operations.

When an async function is called, the callback that will process its result does not execute in the routing context and, consequently, does not benefit from any form of status handling.

app.get ("", (req, res, next) => {
    res.body.write_async ("Hello world!".data, () => {
        next (); // if next throws anything, it's lost
    });
});

What invoke brings is the possibility to invoke a NextCallback in the context of any Router, typically the current one.

app.get ("", (req, res, next) => {
    res.body.write_async ("Hello world!".data, () => {
        app.invoke (req, res, next);
    });
});

It respects the HandlerCallback delegate and can thus be used as a handling middleware with the interesting property of providing an execution context for any pair of Request and Response.

The following example will redirect the client as if the redirection was thrown from the API router, which might possibly handle redirection in a particular manner.

app.get ("api", (req, res) => {
    // redirect old api calls
    api.invoke (req, res, () => { throw new Redirection ("http://api.example.com"); })
});

As we can see, it offers the possibility of executing any NextCallback in any routing context that we might need and reuse behiaviours instead of reimplementing them.

RPM packaging

I wrote a specfile for RPM packaging so that we can distribute the framework on RPM-based distributions like Fedora and openSUSE. The idea is to eventually offer the possibility to install Valum in a Docker container to facilitate the deployment of web services and applications.

I have literally no knowledge about Debian packaging, so if you would like to give me some help on that, I would appreciate.