Http Service

In this section, we show how to use the Http service. The Http service allows each reactor to act as an HTTP server. To use this service, we need to add the reactors-http dependency:

libraryDependencies +=
  "io.reactors" %% "reactors-http" % "<version>"

The Http service can be invoked by different reactors. A server instance is associated with the first reactor that requests a specific port. Until that reactor terminates, other reactors cannot use that port (but they are allowed to request other ports). After a reactor acquires a specific port, it effectively becomes the server at that port. Inbound requests for that port are by default handled on this reactor.

To reply to user requests, the reactor then needs to define a set of routes. Each route specifies how to respond to user requests coming on a different path of the URI. Depending on the route, the reactor can respons with an HTML page, with plain text, or with a resource that has a custom MIME type.

Let’s start by importing the io.reactors and the io.reactors.http packages:

import io.reactors._
import io.reactors.http._

Next, we create a new reactor system, used to hold the server reactor.

val system = ReactorSystem.default("test-system")

We can now declare the server reactor. Our reactor will first fetch the Http service singleton with the expression self.system.service[Http], and then invoke the seq method combined with either text, html or resource to install different routes. We will install three different routes: /hello, /about and /contact, along with the corresponding handlers. Note that in the case of the /hello handler, we read the name parameter from the map of request parameters, and use it to greet the user.

val server = Reactor[Unit] { self =>
  val http = self.system.service[Http]
  http.seq(9500).text("/hello") { req =>
    val name = req.parameters.getOrElse("name", Seq("World"))
    Events(s"Hello, $name.")
  }
  http.seq(9500).html("/about") { req =>
    Events("""
    <html>
    <head>
      <title>About</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h2>About this website</h2>
      <p>
        This website was server using the <code>Http</code> service,
        and was created for you by a custom reactor.
      </p>
    </body>
    </html>
    """)
  }
  http.seq(9500).resource("/contact")("text/xml") { req =>
    val xml = """
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <note>
      <website>http://reactors.io</website>
      <source>https://github.com/reactors-io/reactors</source>
    </note>
    """.trim
    Events(new java.io.ByteArrayInputStream(xml.getBytes))
  }
}

Having defined the server reactor prototype, we next need to spawn it. This is done as follows:

system.spawn(server)

If necessary, you can assign a custom scheduler to your server reactor. For example, if you want to ensure that your server gets a high priority, you can use the custom thread scheduler. See the Schedulers section for more details.

You can now point your browser to http://localhost:9500/hello, and see your web page in action.

Contents

Getting Started Guide

HTTP Service