Fluther Ruby Client

Introduction

This gem provides an interface to the Fluther discussion service. It is implemented as a piece of Rack middleware which handles proxying requests to Fluther and returning the response so that it can be included in your web application. While it should be usable with any Rack-based application, these docs assume you are embedding Fluther in a Rails 2.x application.

Requirements:

Rack
Warden
Thin (optional)

Installation

Add the fluther gem to your application (i.e. in Gemfile or environment.rb).

Create an initializer (e.g. config/initializers/fluther.rb) that inserts the Fluther proxy after the Warden module, mounting it on the appropriate path:


Rails.configuration.after_initialize  do
  Rails.configuration.middleware.insert_after Warden::Manager, Fluther::Proxy, '/qna'
end

In the environment or initializer, add the Fluther configuration:


class Fluther::Config
  # hostname of the Fluther server for this environment (provided by Fluther)
  fluther_host 'fstage.fluther.com'

  # federated API key (provided by Fluther)
  app_key '2b6a0009c414c53e3d4fa8f8c3134d59'

  # mapping of attributes in the User model to the Fluther user
  user_fields :id => :id, :name => :name, :email => :email  # (defaults)
end

Rails Integration

The proxy provides three Rack variables that include the Fluther response: fluther.header, fluther.title, and fluther.response. The first two (may) contain HTML blocks which should be inserted into the page <head> and <title> blocks, respectively, and the third is the HTML for the Fluther widget itself.

To integrate the response into your application, you should add an action which is routed from the same path as the Fluther proxy. For this example, we assume the controller is MainController, the action is fluther, and as above, it is mounted at /qna. Also, we assume that the application layout includes yield(:head) in the <head> block:


# config/routes.rb
map.fluther '/qna/*_', :controller => 'main', :action => 'fluther'


# app/views/main/fluther.html.erb
<%
  if (header = request.env['fluther.header']).present?
    content_for :head, header
  end
  if (title = request.env['fluther.title']).present?
    content_for :head, content_tag(:title, title)
  end
%>
<%= request.env['fluther.response'] -%>

You should now be able to start your application, navigate to http://localhost:300/qna and see the Fluther page.

Thin Integration

The Fluther gem uses EventMachine to perform the HTTP request. When running under a non-EventMachine web server, the proxy request will be performed synchronously. However, when running under the Thin web server, the proxy can take advantage of the presense of EventMachine to perform the request asynchronously, i.e. without blocking the web server process. This does require some additional setup:

Add the async-rack gem to your application.
Add the following Rails code (v2 specific) to the block in the initializer you created above:


...
Rails.configuration.threadsafe!
Rails.configuration.dependency_loading = true
class AsyncRack::Lock  # kludge to disable error on async response in Rack::Lock
  def async_callback(result)
    super
  end
end

To run your application: script/server thin

Credits

Special thanks to Andrew and Ben at Fluther for all their help with integration and testing.

Author: Steve Sloan
License: MIT