This recitation introduces the key ideas behind programming with sockets using the Async library.
Many programs communicate with other programs over a network. Examples include web browsers, databases, SSH, streaming music services, and many others. To support such programs, most operating systems provide an abstraction called sockets that facilitates communicating with programs running on other hosts (or even the same host).
There are two ways to use a socket: a client can connect to a server over a socket, while a server can listen for connections from clients and then respond to requests.
A socket is usually identified by either a DNS name (e.g., www.cs.cornell.edu) or an IP address (e.g., 128.84.154.137), as well as a port (e.g., 80). By convention, commonly used services are associated with specific ports. For example, port 80 is typically used for HTTP traffic. On UNIX machines, a listing of common ports is given in the /etc/services file.The primary job of a server is to create a socket, listen for connections from clients, and handle their requests. Hence, a server consists of some initialization code, and an infinite loop that continuously listens for new connections from clients. To allow multiple clients to use the same server, it is important that the code for different clients execute concurrently—otherwise only one client could interact with the server at a time.
To create a server in Async, we can use the create function from the Tcp.Server module:
val create:
?on_handler_error:[ `Call of
([< Import.Socket.Address.t ] as 'a) -> exn -> unit
| `Ignore
| `Raise ] ->
('a, 'listening_on) Where_to_listen.t ->
('a -> Import.Reader.t -> Import.Writer.t -> unit Import.Deferred.t) ->
('a, 'listening_on) t Import.Deferred.t
The details of these arguments is explained below.
The create function handles much of the boilerplate
code needed to initialize a TCP server.
As an example, consider the following code:
let server : (Socket.Address.Inet.t, int) Tcp.Server.t Deferred.t = Tcp.Server.create ~on_handler_error:`Ignore (Tcp.on_port 3110) (fun a r w -> return () (* dummy handler *)) in ignore (server : (Socket.Address.Inet.t, int) Tcp.Server.t Deferred.t)The first line creates the server itself. The first optional argument, on_handler_error, specifies what should happen if the handler function raises an exception. The `Ignore variant, indicates that the exception should be silently dropped. Other alternatives include propagating the exception to the enclosing context (`Raise), or calling an handler function f provided as an argument (`Call f). The second argument specifies the TCP port to listen on, in this instance 3110. The next argument is a handler function that is invoked on each client. In this case, it is just a dummy that returns a unit value immediately. More generally, it might read input from the client, do some computation, and send a response. The function receives as arguments a, r, and w, which represent the address of the client and the read and write endpoints of a communication channel for interacting with it respectively. The r and w arguments can be converted into values of type Pipe.Reader.t and Pipe.Writer.t using the Reader.pipe and Writer.pipe functions. The final line uses the ignore function to convert the resulting deferred value to a unit value.
To actually run the server, we need need to start the Async scheduler:
never_returns (Scheduler.go ())To test the server, we can connect to it using command-line utilities such as telnet or netcat. On UNIX systems, details can be found in the manual pages (e.g., man telnet or man netcat).
There are several things to notice about this code. First, the handler for each client returns a value of type unit Deferred.t. This allows the server to continue to process requests from other clients while the handler is being executed. It is essential that the code be concurrent because in general the handler may involve a lot of waiting or computation—reading files off of the disk, computing the result of a database query, or waiting for interactive input from the client, etc. For example, in the case of an SSH server, the handler will run as long as the remote shell session is open, which can be weeks or even months! Second, the deferred value corresponding to the server is simply ignored. Usually it is not a good idea to ignore values. However, in the case of a server, this value is often not needed because the server continues listening for connections until the close function is called,
val close : ([< Import.Socket.Address.t ], 'a) t -> unit Import.Deferred.tor the whole process is terminated by the operating system. In this case, we will never need to call close, so the server will run until we kill it.
As we've already seen, one simple way to interact with a server is to use command-line utilities such as telnet to connect to a server, send it input, and receive responses. More generally, we may want to embed a client into a programs. For example, a client could connect to one web server to read a list of prices for a given item, and then connect to a database server to store the data for later analysis. The Async library also includes functions that make it easy to create TCP clients, which can be used hand-in-hand with the functions for creating servers, or with arbitrary other servers on the Internet.
To create a server we can use the following pair of functions:
val to_host_and_port : string -> int -> Socket.Address.t where_to_connect
val connect : 'a where_to_connect -> ('a Socket.t * Reader.t * Writer.t) Deferred.t
As an example, the following code
let client : unit Deferred.t =
Tcp.connect (Tcp.to_host_and_port "localhost" 3110) >>= (fun (sock,r,w) ->
Writer.write_line w "Hello World!";
Reader.read_line r >>= (fun x ->
(match x with
| `Eof -> ()
| `Ok s -> printf "%s" s);
Socket.shutdown sock `Both;
return ()))
connects to the server listening at port 3110 on the local
machine, sends the string "Hello World!" to the server, reads
the response, and then shuts down the connection. The
variant `Both passed to Socket.shutdown indicates
that both the read and write pipes should be closed.
The essential pieces of many clients and servers can be expressed using just these simple functions for creating and communicating over TCP sockets. Analogous functions exist in most other languages, although without Async's abstraction of deferred computation, there are typically many more details related to forking and synchronizing operating-system level threads. If you want to go further, we suggest coding up some simple servers that implement functionality such as serving up a fortune cookie to clients, or fetching the weather from a server such as weather.cornell.edu. On the client side, you may find it interesting to write programs that automate common tasks such as fetching headlines from your favorite newspaper. Another issue to investigate concerns exceptions—what should happen when a client or server does not behave as expected. Generally speaking, exceptions must be handled gracefully, so that a single misbehaving client does not interrupt the service for others. Finally, the Typed TCP module provides a number of useful helper functions for creating clients and servers that communicate using messages drawn from a specific application-level protocol. These functions can be used to automate much of the boilerplate code related to parsing and pretty-printing strings, and also provides a simple form of typechecking.