Michał Wojciechowski

I have recently returned to working on Arriba, the PSGI-compliant web server with support for the SPDY protocol, modeled on Starman.

I sort of released it (on GitHub only, not on CPAN) back in January, at that time the code was passing the tests in Plack::Test::Suite when running as a regular HTTP/HTTPS server. My next goal, before considering the module ready to be released on CPAN, was to make it pass those tests in SPDY mode. This meant I needed to add support for SPDY to good old LWP::UserAgent, which was used as the HTTP client in Plack tests.

Over the weeks/months that followed, I made a few attemps at tackling this problem, but had a hard time wrapping my head around the architecture of LWP::UserAgent and figuring out a reasonable way to add SPDY into the mix. Having very little time to devote to this project, I didn't get anywhere with it.

A few days ago, I was delighted to find out that the problem went away by itself, since Plack switched from using LWP::UserAgent to its own Plack::LWPish, which is built around HTTP::Tiny. Now I needed to implement SPDY in HTTP::Tiny, which is, well, tiny when compared to LWP::UserAgent, so the task seemed much easier. I gave it a shot this weekend and got it working in a matter of hours, spawning HTTP::Tiny::SPDY, a subclass of HTTP::Tiny that works the same as the original, but can also do SPDY.

I immediately used the module for the intended purpose of testing Arriba in SPDY mode, and, as expected, this revealed many problems, but most of them turned out to be easy to fix (except for one, which took me more than three hours just because I didn't RTFM in the first place -- will I ever learn?). Soon, Arriba running SPDY was passing all the tests in the suite, which I happily celebrated with a tasty porter beer. I am now cleaning up the code to prepare it to be finally released on CPAN.

And speaking of CPAN, HTTP::Tiny::SPDY is already there, as well as on GitHub. Like Arriba, this is an early release, the code is hackish and immature, and I take zero responsibility for the pain and suffering that you may bring upon yourself when you try to use it. But if you do, I crave your feedback.