Book Image

D Web Development

By : Kai Nacke
Book Image

D Web Development

By: Kai Nacke

Overview of this book

D is a programming language with C-like syntax and static typing. The vibe.d framework builds on powerful D concepts like template meta-programming and compile-time function execution to provide an easy-to-use environment for web applications. The combination of a feature-rich web programming framework with a language compiling to native code solves two common issues in web development today: it accelerates your development and it results in fast, native web applications. Learning the vibe.d framework before you start your application will help you to choose the right features to reach your goal. This book guides you through all aspects of web development with D and the vibe.d framework. Covering the popular operating systems today, this guide starts with the setup of your development system. From the first Hello World-style application you will move on to building static web pages with templates. The concise treatment of web forms will give you all the details about form handling and web security. Using the abstractions of the web framework you will learn how to easily validate user input. Next, you will add database access to your application, providing persistent storage for your data. Building on this foundation, you will expose your component and integrate other components via REST. Learning about the internals of vibe.d you will be able to use low-level techniques such as raw TCP access. The vibe.d concepts can also be used for GUI clients, which is the next topic that you will learn. vibe.d is supported by an active community, which adds new functionality. This comprehensive guide concludes with an overview of the most useful vibe.d extensions and where to find them. It also shows you how to integrate these extensions in your application. The concepts are always illustrated with source code, giving you an insight into how to apply them in your application.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
D Web Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The GUI event loop and vibe.d


Every modern graphical user interface is event-based. The typical events are keystrokes, mouse moves, and requests to repaint a part of the screen. A common requirement is that you have to react quickly to the event. If you fail to do so, then your user interface seems to be frozen. Most of the time, it is recommended that you move long-running computations to a separate thread. While this sounds like a good idea, there are some pitfalls. Some systems allow only the thread running the event loop to draw on the screen. In this case, you have to synchronize with the event thread, which can get complicated very fast.

Now, recall the fiber-based pseudo-blocking programming model from vibe.d, described in the previous chapter. An event queue is used to handle notifications that stem from asynchronous I/O. The processing is done in a fiber, which should quickly invoke the event loop again. As both concepts are so similar, the obvious idea is to combine both.

Depending...