Author: Ashish Datta

Ashish graduated from Tufts University with a BS in computer science. Prior to Setfive Consulting, he worked at ArmchairGM and later Wikia. He has a disposition for single malt scotch and believes drinking on patios constitutes “being outdoorsy”. Connect with him on Quora, LinkedIn, or Google+

TypeScript: Angular 1.5 Quickstart

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on TypeScript: Angular 1.5 Quickstart

We recently started a new project and decided to use TypeScript along with Angular 1.5. Angular 1.5 introduces a new abstraction called a “component” which closely resembles Angular 2’s component based approach. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of simple TypeScript sample code available for Angular 1.5 so I decided to throw something together in case anyone else is looking. The code is available at https://github.com/Setfive/ng_typescript_starter and a live demo of it is running at http://code.setfive.com/ng_typescript_starter.

So what are some standouts with TypeScript and Angular 1.5?

  • The 1 way bindings components introduce are easier to reason about but having to explicitly add functions for “outputs” does add some verbosity
  • Related to that, there’s a fair amount of boilerplate to create a single component since you have to define 2 classes
  • Dropping $scope in favor of automatically binding the controller object to $ctrl in templates is great – especially with TypeScript classes
  • Related to that, without $scope for events it’s unclear when it’s appropriate to use $rootScope for an event bus
  • You can write typesafe code for almost all of your controller business logic
  • It’s really unfortunate the TypeScript compiler can’t typecheck your Angular templates
  • Using the $inject annotation with component classes looks “right” versus the “array like” syntax
  • You need to be somewhat cognizant of matching your @types annotations with the correct version of the library you’re using
  • Using components with ui-router makes it fairly difficult to communicate between sibling views

Anyway, beyond fighting with build tools to convert a TypeScript project into usable JavaScript the language part has been great to work with. We ended up using Browserify with tsify but it was pretty frustrating to get it working. I might of missed something but it seems like I needed tsify available in a separate node_modules directory from the project source. The demo app is setup this way for that reason.

As always, questions and comments are welcome!

TypeScript: An hour with TypeScript

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on TypeScript: An hour with TypeScript

Over the past few day we’ve been evaluating using Angular 1.x vs. Angular 2 for a new project on which in the past we would have used Angular 1.x without much debate. However, with release of Angular 2 around the corner we decided to evaluate what starting a project with Angular 2 would involve. As we started digging in it became clear that using Angular 2 without programming in TypeScript would be technically possible but painful to put it lightly. Because of the tight timeline of the project we decided that was too large of a technical risk so we decided to move forward with 1.x. But I decided to spend some time looking at TypeScript anyway, for science. I didn’t have anything substantial to write but needed to hammer out a quick HTML scraper so I decided to whip it up in TypeScript.

Getting started with TypeScript is easy you just use npm to install the tranpiler and you’re off to the races. As I started experimenting, I fired up PhpStorm 10+ and was thrilled to learn it has good TypeScript support out of the box (thanks JetBrains!). The scraper I was writing is pretty simple – make a series of HTTP requests, extract some elements out of the HTML via CSS selectors, and write the results out to a CSV. Coming from a JavaScript background, jumping right into TypeScript was easy enough since TypeScripts’ syntax is basically ES2015 with additional Java or C# like type declarations. The scraper is less than 100 lines so I didn’t get a great sense of what programming with TypeScript would be like but here are some initial takeaways.

It’s easy to end up missing out on the benefits. Since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript you’re free to ignore all the type features and write TypeScript that is basically ES2015. Combine that with the fact that the tsc transpiler will produce JavaScript even with type errors and you can quickly find yourself not enjoying any of the benefits TypeScripts introduces. This issue isn’t unique to TypeScript since you can famously write You Can Write FORTRAN in any Language but I think since its a superset of an existing, popular langue the temptation is much stronger.

Discovering functionality in modules is easier. In order to properly interface with nodejs modules you’ll need to grab type definitions from somewhere like DefinitelyTyped. The definition files are similar to “.h” files from C++, code stubs that just provide function type signatures to TypeScript. An awesome benefit of this is that it’s much easier to “discover” the functionality of nodejs modules by looking at how the functions transform data between types. It also makes it much easier to figure out the parameters of a callback without having to dig into docs or code.

Typed generics will unequivocally reduce bugs. I’d bet a beer or two that most web developers spend the majority of their day writing code that deals with lists. Creating them, filtering them, transforming them, etc. Unfortunately, most of the popular scripting languages don’t have support for typed generics and specifically enforcing uniform types within arrays. Specifically with JavaScript, it’s pretty easy to end up at a point where you’re unsure of what’s contained in a list and moreover if the objects within it share any of the same properties. Because of this, I think TypeScript’s typed generics will cut down on bugs almost immediately.

TypeScript is definitely interesting and it’s tight coupling to Angular 2 only bolsters how useful it’ll be in the future. Next up, I’d be interested in building something more substantial with both a client and server component and hopefully share some of the same code on both.

As always, questions and comments are more than welcome!

AngularJS: Use jQuery to serialize a form

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on AngularJS: Use jQuery to serialize a form

Note: This is a bad idea™. Don’t do it unless you know why you’re doing it.

AngularJS’s form control to Javascript object binding is pretty core to how the framework works but at some point you might find yourself wishing you could just serialize a form. Maybe you’re getting the HTML for the form from a 3rd party source so it would be hard to bind to an object. Or maybe the form you have is huge and you don’t really care about validating it. So how can you serialize a form in AngularJS like you would in jQuery?

What you need to do is create a custom directive to render you form, use the directive’s “link” function to grab the form element, and then use jQuery’s serialize() function to generate a string that you could shoot off in a POST request.

Here’s a sample implementation:


Again, you should really only do this if you have a valid reason since you’re really fighting the framework by manipulating data this way.

Apache Flume: Building a custom UDP source

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Apache Flume: Building a custom UDP source

Following up on our previous post, after evaluating Flume we decided it was a good fit and chose to move forward with it. In our specific use case the data we are gathering is ephemeral so we didn’t need to enforce any deliverability or durability guarantees. For us, missing messages or double delivery is fine as long as the business logic throughput on the application side wasn’t affected. Concretely, our application is high volume, low latency HTTP message broker and we’re looking to record the request URLs via Flume into S3.

One of the compelling aspects of Flume is that it ships with several ways to ingest and syndicate your data via sources and sinks. Since we’re targeting S3 we’d settled on using the default HDFS sink but we have some options on the source. For a general case with complex events the Avro source would be the natural choice but since we’re just logging lines of text the NetCat source looked like a better fit. One of the issues we had with the NetCat source is that it’s TCP based so on the application side we’d need to implement timeouts and connection management on the application side. In addition to that, looking at the code of the NetCat source you’ll notice it’s implemented using traditional Java NIO sockets but if you check out the Avro source it’s built using Netty NIO which can leverage libevent on Linux.

Given those issues and our relaxed durability requirements we started looking at the available UDP sources. The Syslog UDP source looked the promising but it actually validates the format of the inbound messages so we wouldn’t be able to send messages with just the URLs. The code for the Syslog UDP source looked pretty straightforward so at this point we decided to build a custom source based on the existing Syslog UDP source. Our final code ended up looking like:

The big changes were in the implementation of messageReceived and the creation of the new extractEvent method. Including your new source in Flume is straightforward, you just need to build a JAR and drop that into Flume’s “lib/” folder. The easiest way to do this is with javac and jar to package it up. You’ll just need a binary copy of Flume so that you can reference its JARs. Build it with:

And then, you can test this out by creating a file named “agent1.conf” in your Flume directory containing:

Finally, you need to launch Flume by running:

ashish@ashish:~/Downloads/apache-flume-1.6.0-bin$ bin/flume-ng agent --conf conf --conf-file agent1.conf --name a1 -Dflume.root.logger=INFO,console

And then to test it you can use “netcat” to fire off some UDP packets with:

ashish@ashish:~/Downloads$ echo "hi flume" | nc -4u -w1 localhost 44444

Which you should see come across your console that’s running Flume. Be aware, the Flume logger truncates messages so if you send a longer string you won’t see it in the logger.

And that’s it. Non-durable, UDP source built and deployed. Anyway, we’re still pretty new to Flume so any feedback or comments would be appreciated!

Apache Flume: Setting up Flume for an S3 sink

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Apache Flume: Setting up Flume for an S3 sink

We’ve been evaluating Apache Flume over the last few weeks as part of a client project we’re working on. At a high level, our goal was to get plain text data generated by one of our applications running in a non-AWS datacenter back into Amazon S3 so that we could load it into Redshift. Reading through the Is Flume a good fit? section of their docs it perfectly describes this use case:

If you need to ingest textual log data into Hadoop/HDFS then Flume is the right fit for your problem, full stop

OK great, but what about writing into S3? It turns out you can use the HDFS sink to write into S3 if you use a “path” configuration formatted like ‘s3n://<AWS.ACCESS.KEY>:<AWS.SECRET.KEY>@<bucket.name>’.

But wait! Unfortunately Flume doesn’t ship with “batteries included” for writing to HDFS and S3 so you’ll need to grab a couple more dependencies before you can get this working. Frustratingly, you need to grab version compatible JARs of the Amazon S3 client, HDFS, and Hadoop with S3 compatibility. After flailing around downloading packages, hitting an error, downloading more JARs, and finally getting Flume working I realized there had to be a better way to replicate the process.

Enter Maven! Since we’re just grabbing down JARs it’s actually possible to use a pom.xml to describe what dependencies we need, let Maven grab the JARs, and then copy the JARs into a local folder. Here’s a working pom.xml file against Flume 1.6:

To use it, just run “mvn process-sources” and you’ll end up with all the JARs conveniently in a “lib/” folder in the current directory. Copy those JARs into the “lib/” folder of your Flume download and you should be off to the races. Note: These are very possibly more JARs than you need to get Flume running but as Maven dependencies this is the simplest I could come up with.

Flushing out the steps to getting a working S3 sink you should be able to do the following:

Before you run the last command to launch Flume you’ll need to edit “agent1.conf” to enter your Amazon token, secret key, and S3 bucket location. You’ll need to create the S3 bucket before trying to write to it with Flume. And then finally, to test that everything is working you can use netcat with the following:

Back on the terminal with Flume you should see debug data about receiving the message an a notification about an S3 upload. So what’s next? Not much, you’ll need to pick an appropriate source and then tune your HDFS and channel parameters for the amount of throughput you need.

As always, questions and comments welcome!