hardcandy

https://github.com/bnfinet/hardcandy

Benjamin Foote
hardcandy@bnf.net
http://bnf.net

hardcandy is a big sucker!

Periodically gets things from the internet with a specific lifecycle (a poller of URLs)

The base library hardcandy.js is meant to be inherited. Examples for rss and tweets are included.

We use this at the personal telco project as a backing service for api.personaltelco.net
http://personaltelco.net
https://github.com/personaltelco/rest-api

Installation

    npm install --save git+ssh://git@github.com:bnfinet/hardcandy.git

the lifecycle of a hardcandy item

(using rss as an example)

- register a new url
- immediately try to go and download content
- store it in memory in a json object

- start the poller
- periodically, go and get content from each registered url
- if there's an error, try again later
- if there are too many errors, drop it

- on shutdown write to disk for all urls

- on next startup, load from disk and poll

Usage

RSS

backed by FeedParser

var HCRss = require('../lib/hc_rss.js');
var hcrss = new HCRss({
    type : 'rss',                       // a short string
    max_items : 5,                      // the max items we'll store at a time for each url
    update_frequency : 61 * 60 * 1000,  // how often the polling should kick off
    timeout : 4 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000,  // if we don't successfully get the feed for longer than maximum_age we drop the feed
    errlimit : 20,                      // errs allowed before we drop 
    file : __dirname + '/data/_hc_rss.json'  // no file, no persistence
});

var feeds = ['http://myblog.net/rss','http://yourblog.org/rss']; // backed by FeedParser so atom works too

hcrss.registerSource(feeds[0], function(err, items) {
    if (err) {
        // handle it
    }
    // publish items
    console.log('here are the rss entries for ' + feeds[0], items);
}
var items = hcrss.getItems(feeds[0]);
hcrss.startPeriodicRefresh(); // can be called at any time really, uses update_frequency as the interval 

hcrss.registerSource(feeds[1], function(err, items) {
    if (err) {
        // handle it
    }
    // publish items
    console.log('here are the rss entries for ' + feeds[1], items);
}
hcrss.stopPeriodicRefresh();
hcrss.shutdown(function(){
    console.log('done!');        
});

Twitter

using ntwitter

var HCTwitter = require('hc_twitter');
var hctwitter = new HCTwitter({
        type : 'twitter',
        max_items : 5,
        update_frequency : 61 * 60 * 1000,
        timeout : 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000,
        errlimit : 20,
        file : __dirname + '/data/_hc_tweets.json',  // no file, no persistence
        ntwitter = {
            consumer_key : '',
            consumer_secret : '',
            access_token_key : '',
            access_token_secret : ''
        };
}

// everything else is essentially the same as the rss example
hctwitter.registerSource(url, function(err, items) {
    if (err) {
        // handle it
    }
    // publish items
    console.log('here are the tweets!', items);
}
hctwitter.getItems(url, function(err, items) {
    if (err) {
        // handle it
    }
    // publish items
    console.log('here are the tweets!', items);
}

Roll Your Own

If you look at ./lib/hc_tweets.js you'll see an inheritance from hardcandy.js and a function 'getAndParse'

You should create the getAndParse function with the following basic form....

MyAwesomeHC.prototype.getAndParse = function(key, cb) {
    var self = this;
    self.log('getAndParse', key);
    
    // work your magic with getting and parsing
    myAwesomeDownloadAndExtractionRoutine(function(err, data) {
        if (err) {
            self.log(err)
            return self.parserErr(err, sn, cb);
        }
        return cb(err, data);
    });
};

You'll also need to pass config in your constructor and inherit from HardCandy (using utils.inherits in this case)

function MyAwesomeHC(config) { 
    if (this.configure(config)) {
        this.log('new MyAwesomeHC');
    }
}
util.inherits(HardCandyTweets, HardCandy);

Have fun and please do send me pulls!

TODO

spin hc_rss.js and hc_tweets.js off into their own repos use a key=value store, probably Mongo, as an optional persistence layer or perhaps node-lru-cache