Question

I’m playing with EventMachine for some days now which has a steep learn curve IMHO 😉 I try to return a hash by triggering HttpHeaderCrawler.query() which I need within the callback. But what I get in this case is not the hash {‘http_status’ => xxx, ‘http_version’ => xxx} but an EventMachine::HttpClient Object itself.

I wanna keep the EM.run block clean and wanna do all logic within own classes / modules so how to return such a value into the main loop to access it by the callback? Many thanks in advance 😉

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'eventmachine'
require 'em-http-request'

class HttpHeaderCrawler
  include EM::Deferrable

  def query(uri)
    http = EM::HttpRequest.new(uri).get
    http.callback do
      http_header = {
        "http_status" => http.response_header.http_status,
        "http_version" => http.response_header.http_version
      }
      puts "Returns to EM main loop: #{http_header}"
      succeed(http_header)
    end
  end
end

EM.run do
  domains = ['http://www.google.com', 'http://www.facebook.com', 'http://www.twitter.com']
  domains.each do |domain|
    hdr = HttpHeaderCrawler.new.query(domain)
    hdr.callback do |header|
      puts "Received from HttpHeaderCrawler: #{header}"
    end
  end
end

This snippet produces the following output:

Returns to EM main loop: {"http_status"=>302, "http_version"=>"1.1"}
Received from HttpHeaderCrawler: #<EventMachine::HttpClient:0x00000100d57388>
Returns to EM main loop: {"http_status"=>301, "http_version"=>"1.1"}
Received from HttpHeaderCrawler: #<EventMachine::HttpClient:0x00000100d551a0>
Returns to EM main loop: {"http_status"=>200, "http_version"=>"1.1"}
Received from HttpHeaderCrawler: #<EventMachine::HttpClient:0x00000100d56280>

Answer 1

I think the problem is #query returns http.callback, which returns the http object itself, whereas it should return self, i.e. the HttpHeaderCrawler. See if this works.

def query(uri)
  http = EM::HttpRequest.new(uri).get
  http.callback do
    http_header = {
      "http_status" => http.response_header.http_status,
      "http_version" => http.response_header.http_version
    }
    puts "Returns to EM main loop: #{http_header}"
    succeed(http_header)
  end
  self
end