jeff.dallien.net

Now that I have determined for myself that writing a web app in Prolog is a reasonable thing to do, I am trying to decide what direction to take it in. What I’ve done so far is get a specific application written but I’d like to package up some code and come up with a pattern or set of conventions for designing and deploying Prolog web apps to make things easier for others.

Due to the fact that most of my experience with web apps is with Rails, I was tempted to just start organizing things the way a Rails application would be organized. I don’t want to just write a Rails clone, and I especially don’t want to do that just because its the thing I thought of first. To get some inspiration for possible structure, features and philosophy I could use in my code, I decided to explore what else is out there. My first stop is Sinatra.

The idea

For a long time I was idea starved when it came to new programming projects. The technical know-how was there, but what to build? Luckily these days I’ve got a list of ideas that I can’t keep up with. I picked something that would be useful to myself and that I could write fairly quickly.

I wanted to write an RSS feed joiner, something that would take two RSS feed URLs and merge them into a single feed, and most importantly, would remove duplicate articles from the newly created feed. The inspiration for this comes from the CBC’s Canadian news feed and Nova Scotia news feed. Both are interesting to me, but every day a few articles will show up in both feeds that are exactly the same. These are either some national issue that has local relevance or vice versa.

Amalgamator

A Friday evening and a Saturday later, the resulting Sinatra application is Amalgamator. You know it is free software because no marketing department would name it that. The code is on GitHub and a deployed instance is also available to use as part of this site. To parse the RSS feeds I used the Feedzirra gem for the first time and I found it simple to use and encountered no problems with it. I used RSpec for Test Driven Development and I deployed using Passenger.

Thoughts on Sinatra

I really enjoyed using Sinatra and it really felt suitable for this type of small application. Some of the things I could see that may influence my Prolog code are:

• The Sinatra style of declaring what routes the application responds to, and the code associated with each one. This really reminded me of the http_handler/3 predicate in the SWI-Prolog HTTP library. Consider the Hello World example for Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/hi' do
  "Hello World!"
end

and a Hello World example for SWI-Prolog’s HTTP library:

:- http_handler('/hi', hello_world, []).

hello_world(_Request) :-
  reply_html_page([], [p('Hello World!')]).

• Layouts can be included at the end of source files. This matches the functionality of the templating system I’ve already extracted from Prolog Server Pages.
• Fewer files and less configuration to do than Rails.

One way I think I will ultimately differ from Sinatra is its lack of helpers for building HTML, such as links, image tags, and forms. I think I will want to add some of these to my code to make generating HTML easier in Prolog.

One of the reasons that Sinatra works as a minimal framework is the large number of Ruby libraries available as gems to do so many of the things a web (or any) application needs to do. Sinatra provides the basics and then the developer can bring in just what they need. This won’t work the same way in Prolog. There are Prolog libraries out there, but not to the extent they are being developed and released for Ruby.

Overall, I think having something similar to the style of a Sinatra application would be really good for those wanting to get an existing Prolog application on the web. I think my small detour to Sinatra was very beneficial. I gained some perspective on framework design and I also moved an idea off my todo list and into a useful application.