D Web Development

Table of Contents

D Web Development

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Getting Started with Your First Web Application

Installing the D compiler and the DUB package manager

Ubuntu and Debian

Fedora

OS X

Windows

Building from source

Verifying your environment

Creating your first web application

Using DUB to set up the project structure

Creating your first template

Summary

2. Using Templates for Your Web Pages

Benefits of using templates

Creating your first template

Turning the HTML page into a Diet template

Adding inheritance

Using includes

Integrating other languages with blocks and filters

Solving common tasks

Configuring the document type

Comments in a template

More about tags

Localizing your website

Adding D code to your template

Summary

3. Get Interactive – Forms and Flow Control

Introducing the note application

Creating a template with a simple form

A closer look at route matching

Serving static files

Storing session data

Authenticating the user

Using basic authentication

Using digest authentication

Form-based authentication

Enabling TLS/SSL with your application

Displaying an error page

Uploading files

Summary

4. Easy Forms with the Web Framework

Taking advantage of unique D features

Converting the note application

Naming the handler functions

Passing values of form fields

Creating sessions and session variables

Putting everything together

Validating user input

Displaying error messages with @errorDisplay

Refining the validation

Adding authentication

Localizing the web content

Summary

5. Accessing a Database

Choosing the right database technology

Relational databases

A key-value store

Document databases

Making a choice

Using the Redis key-value store

Installing Redis

Accessing Redis from the note application

Using the MongoDB document database

Installing MongoDB

Persisting data with MongoDB

Using the MySQL relational database

Installing MySQL

Using MySQL with vibe.d

Summary

6. Using the REST Interface

Defining the principles of the World Wide Web

Serializing D to JSON and back

Creating and using a REST service

Providing a service

Using a service

Tailoring the generated REST API

Changing the generated path

Passing parameters

Accessing CouchDB

Installing CouchDB

Testing the REST interface

Implementing the NoteStore service

Summary

7. The vibe.d Internals

The programming model of vibe.d

What is a fiber?

Benefits of asynchronous I/O

Combining threads, fibers, and asynchronous I/O

Coding your own main function

Performing background work

Running a fiber-based task

Using a thread

Porting an existing driver

An alternative solution for the existing drivers

Summary

8. Using vibe.d with a GUI Client

The GUI event loop and vibe.d

Creating a Win32 GUI application

Creating an X11 GUI application

Integrating with other GUI toolkits

Summary

9. Power Your Application with vibe.d Extensions

Publishing your project in the DUB registry

Useful community projects

Adding WebDAV services

Running your own blog

Chatting with IRC

Coding for the Internet of Things

Serving news

Accessing the Apache Cassandra database

Summary

Index

D Web Development

D Web Development

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: January 2016

Production reference: 1250116

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78528-889-0

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Credits

Author

Kai Nacke

Reviewers

Orfeo Da Vià

Stephan Dilly

Paul Féraud

Kazuki Komatsu

Adam D. Ruppe

Robert burner Schadek

Acquisition Editor

Tushar Gupta

Content Development Editor

Merwyn D'souza

Technical Editor

Pranil Pathare

Copy Editor

Tasneem Fatehi

Project Coordinator

Neha Bhatnagar

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Mariammal Chettiyar

Production Coordinator

Arvindkumar Gupta

Cover Work

Arvindkumar Gupta

Foreword

As a general-purpose language, D has held good potential of being applied in the burgeoning web server domain. D's build speed makes its convenience close to that of scripting languages—the argument goes—and there's also a lot to like about the running speed of the resulting native code, too.

This has remained a theoretical possibility for a good while, until vibe.d came out of nowhere to take the D community by storm. The vibe.d framework is everything that I'd hoped it to be—a comprehensive, compelling, modern framework that wonderfully uses D's features to strike a balance between flexibility, performance, and ease of use.

It is everything I hoped... except for one thing. It doesn't have a good book teaching it properly. Therefore, it's easy to imagine my giddiness now that I was offered the honor to write this foreword for such a book.

Written by Kai Nacke, a long-standing and respected luminary of the D community (known among other things for LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler), D Web Development does an admirable job of taking its reader from not knowing much about web development (as I confess your truly is, or at least was) to getting a high-performance server up and running. Also, customizing it in so many ways: content, localization, data connectivity, interoperation, and defining extensions.

Since its creation, vibe.d has slowly but surely become one of the most important frameworks written in D and simultaneously one of the best examples of using D on large scale, so much so that vibe.d is being made part of the reference D distribution. This book is a necessary and welcome term of that equation.

Andrei Alexandrescu

Co-developer of the D programming language

About the Author

Kai Nacke is a professional IT architect living in Düsseldorf, Germany. He holds a diploma in computer science from the University of Dortmund. His diploma thesis about universal hash functions was recognized as the best of the semester. He has been with IBM for more than 15 years, and has great experience in the development and architecture of business and enterprise applications.

Fascinated by the first home computer, he learned to program a VIC-20 in BASIC. Later, he turned to Turbo PASCAL and Small C on CP/M. Experimenting with the source of Small C created his interest in compiler technology. Many computers, operating systems, and languages followed these first steps.

Around 2005, he became interested in the D programming language and created the first fun applications in D. Missing a 64-bit D compiler for Windows, he started to contribute to the LLVM compiler framework and LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler. Soon, he became committer of both projects and is now the current maintainer of LDC.

He is also a speaker at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) and was one of the reviewers of D Cookbook, Packt Publishing.

Writing a book is challenging. I would like to thank everybody who supported me by answering questions, accepting pull requests, or by simply encouraging me to go on. I would also like to thank the reviewers who did a great job. Their comments really contributed to the quality of the book.

About the Reviewers

Orfeo Da Vià is an Italian software developer and has been professionally developing software since 1994. Over the past four years, he has written a number of D software applications.

Orfeo is currently employed as a senior developer at Microline.

Outside the software world, Orfeo enjoys spending time with his two daughters, Raffaella and Adele, and his wife, Alessandra.

Stephan Dilly works as the head of front-end engineering at InnoGames in Germany. In the nine years of professional software development, he has worked in the games industry for Funatics and Ubisoft Blue Byte. He has also worked as a software consultant at Sopra Steria Consulting. The D programming language has been his language of choice for his spare-time projects since 2006. In 2014, Stephan was a speaker at the DConf in San Francisco, where he talked about a backend server architecture developed in D.

Paul Féraud is software engineer with passion for math, algorithms, and programming. He holds a diplôme d'Ingénieur in mechanical engineering from the École Centrale de Nantes in France and a master's degree in software engineering from Keio University in Japan.

Paul has worked for Amadeus, developing a business rule engine that is designed for very high throughput. He has also worked for Dassault Systèmes, developing the architecture backing SIMULIA's finite element simulation systems.

In parallel to this, Paul took great interest in the D programming language and began contributing to its development. He became a member of the core development team and has participated in the design and implementation of its standard library.

Paul now works for Google in Switzerland. He spends most of his time raising his beautiful daughter with his loving and supporting wife.

Kazuki Komatsu is a university student, currently majoring in wireless communication engineering. He started learning D programming language at the age of 16. He has been writing D grammar documents in Japanese and creating a variety of D libraries, such as linear algebra, compile-time meta programming, and Twitter client. Recently, Kazuki has been creating GUI toolkit, awebview, which is similar to GitHub's Electron; however, awebview is written with D and we can write GUI apps with D, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Adam D. Ruppe is the author of D Cookbook, Packt Publishing and a long-time contributor to the D ecosystem.

Robert burner Schadek is a regular contributor to the standard D library, Phobos. His D journey started when he used D to create a Distributed Multithreaded Caching D compiler for his computer science master's thesis. He presented this work at DConf 2013. His commitment to Phobos can be seen all over the library. His biggest contribution to Phobos is the experimental logging framework. He is currently working on his PhD in computer science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. There, he uses the high-performance computing (HPC) facility of the university and a lot of C++ to crunch the numbers on his original data-replication protocol. However, during his programming, he has learned one thing to be true—every untested function is buggy.

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Preface

In the cloud age, web technologies are more important than ever. The vibe.d framework enables you to use the D programming language for a wide range of web-related tasks. The D programming language allows elegant solutions for common problems, while native compilation produces fast binaries. The vibe.d framework takes advantage of these language features. Together with the innovative use of fibers, the applications that you build are scalable and have a very quick response time.

This book will explain everything you need to know about the vibe.d framework in order to successfully build and run web applications.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Your First Web Application, explains how to set up and use your development environment. At the end of this chapter, you will have already created your first web application.

Chapter 2, Using Templates for Your Web Pages, covers the Diet template engine. You will learn all about templates—from creating simple static templates to using D code in templates.

Chapter 3, Get Interactive – Forms and Flow Control, brings web forms to your application and introduces route matching.

Chapter 4, Easy Forms with the Web Framework, discusses how to validate user input.

Chapter 5, Accessing a Database, shows how to use a database in an application using a variety of SQL and NoSQL bases.

Chapter 6, Using the REST Interface, teaches you about REST services. You will learn how to provide and consume a generated REST service. You will also study how to interface with an existing REST service.

Chapter 7, The vibe.d Internals, introduces you to the fiber-based pseudo-blocking