Thick

The project has been merged with WildWeb and lives there.

Thick is very lightweight web server for JRuby based on excellent Netty library.

Status

Works on several Sinatra and Rails applications. No real testing, yet.

Speed

see PERFORMANCE.md

Interfaces

Thick provides interfaces to control it's behaviour.

WebSockets

Thick allows to handle WebSocket in a simple and (IMHO) not intrusive way.

When a request to WebSocket is received, the server send a PUT request to

/thick/websockets

and provides two keys in the environment

env['thick.websocket'].set_handler(Your::Handler)
env['thick.websocket'].hand_shake("websocket URL")

Your::Handler should subclass Thick::WebSocket class. It is used to provide interface between your application and the connection. The interface for communication from the client to your application looks like

class WebSocket < WebSocketHandler

  def on_open
    raise NotImplementedError.new("You should implement '#on_open' method.")
  end

  def on_data(data)
    raise NotImplementedError.new("You should implement '#on_data(data)' method.")
  end

  def on_close
    raise NotImplementedError.new("You should implement '#on_close' method.")
  end

end

Two more methods are available to control communicate back to the client

send("data") # sends data back to client
close # closes the connection

The hand_shake("url") method URL asks the server to finish the hand shake and upgrade the connection to WebSocket.

Asynchronous responses

Asynchronous responses provide functionality to stream response to the client by chunks.

To enable streaming, run

env['thick.response'].chunked # For chunked encoded stream
env['thick.response'].streamed # For raw stream

and define "thick.async" callback in environment, so it reacts to "call" and takes one argument

env['thick.async'] = proc do |response|
  # do something here
end

now simply respond as usual. Once the headers and the basic content is sent, the callback will be invoked.

To write content to the stream use

response.writeContent("some content")

and do not forget close the stream once done

response.close

Example using Sinatra

require 'sinatra/base'

class App < Sinatra::Base

  get '/' do
    env['thick.async'] = proc do |response|
      (1..10).each do |i|
        response.writeContent(i.to_s)
        sleep(1)
      end
      response.close
    end
    env['thick.response'].chunked
    "0"
  end

end

run App

Starting

thick [-o <interface>] [-p <port>] [-E <environment>]

Installation

gem install thick

License

MIT ... let me know if that's a problem for you.