NAME¶
Mojolicious::Guides::FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
OVERVIEW¶
This document contains answers for the most frequently asked questions about
Mojolicious.
QUESTIONS¶
How does Mojolicious compare to other Perl web frameworks?¶
The short answer is "it doesn't", because we interpret the words
"web framework" much more literally than others. With the emergence
of the "real-time web" and new technologies such as
"WebSockets", we are facing new challenges that go way beyond what
commonly used modules like LWP were designed for. Because of this, Mojolicious
contains a whole new HTTP client/server stack called Mojo, which was heavily
inspired by the original "LWPng" effort and carefully designed with
these new requirements in mind. So while some of the higher abstraction layers
might look similar to other web frameworks, it actually defines a whole new
category and could even be the foundation for more advanced ones in the
future.
Why doesn't Mojolicious have any dependencies?¶
We are optimizing Mojolicious for user-friendliness and development speed,
without compromises. While there are no rules in
Mojolicious::Guides::Contributing that forbid dependencies, we do currently
discourage adding non-optional ones in favor of a faster and more painless
installation process. And we do in fact already use several optional CPAN
modules such as EV, IO::Socket::IP, IO::Socket::SSL and Plack to provide
advanced functionality if they are installed.
Why reinvent wheels?¶
Because we can make them rounder. Components specifically designed for
user-friendliness and development speed are not easy to come by. We are strong
believers of the Perl mantra "There is more than one way to do it",
and our quest is to develop the best possible solutions for these two
criteria.
What about backwards compatibility?¶
In conformance with Mojolicious::Guides::Contributing, we will always deprecate
a feature before removing or changing it in incompatible ways between major
releases. New features can however be marked as experimental to explicitly
exclude them from these rules. This gives us the necessary freedom to ensure a
healthy future for Mojolicious. So, as long as you are not using anything
marked experimental, untested or undocumented, you can always count on
backwards compatibility, everything else would be considered a bug.
Why not split up Mojolicious into many smaller
distributions?¶
Because there are no advantages, it drastically increases maintenance costs and
installation times without giving us anything in return. It would only make
sense if we wanted to pass ownership of a module to a new maintainer, which we
already have done in the past.
What does the error "Maximum message size exceeded"
mean?¶
To protect your applications from excessively large requests and responses, our
HTTP parser has a cap after which it will automatically stop accepting new
data, and in most cases force the connection to be closed. This limit is
around "5MB" by default, you can use the MOJO_MAX_MESSAGE_SIZE
environment variable to change this value.
What does the error "Maximum line size exceeded"
mean?¶
This is a very similar protection mechanism to the one described in the previous
answer, but a little more specific. It limits the maximum length of any
"\x0d\x0a" terminated part of a HTTP message, such as request line,
status line and headers. This limit is around "10KB" by default, you
can use the MOJO_MAX_LINE_SIZE environment variable to change this value.
What does the error "Maximum buffer size exceeded"
mean?¶
This protection mechanism is very similar to those mentioned in the two previous
answers. It limits how much content the HTTP parser is allowed to buffer when
parsing chunked, compressed and multipart messages. This limit is around
"256KB" by default, you can use the MOJO_MAX_BUFFER_SIZE environment
variable to change this value.
What does the error "EV does not work with ithreads"
mean?¶
The Mojolicious user agent and web servers are based on an event loop that
supports multiple reactor backends. One of these backends is EV, it is very
fast and will be automatically used if installed. On Windows however, the
"ithreads" based "fork()" emulation can interfere with it,
and you may have to use the MOJO_REACTOR environment variable to enforce a
more portable one.
MOJO_REACTOR=Mojo::Reactor::Poll
What does "Your secret passphrase needs to be changed"
mean?¶
Mojolicious uses a secret passphrase for security features such as signed
cookies. It defaults to the name of your application, which is not very
secure, so we added this log message as a reminder. You can change the
passphrase with the attribute "secret" in Mojolicious.
app->secret('My very secret passphrase.');
What does "Nothing has been rendered, expecting delayed
response" mean?¶
Mojolicious has been designed from the ground up for non-blocking I/O and event
loops. So when a new request comes in and no response is generated right away,
it will assume that this was intentional and return control to the web server,
which can then handle other requests while waiting for events such as timers
to finally generate a response.
What does "Inactivity timeout" mean?¶
To protect your applications from denial-of-service attacks, all connections
have an inactivity timeout which limits how long a connection may be inactive
before being closed automatically. It defaults to 20 seconds for the user
agent and 15 seconds for all built-in web servers, and is commonly referred to
as "inactivity_timeout". This timeout always applies, so you might
have to tweak it for applications that take a long time to process a request.
What does "Premature connection close" mean?¶
This error message is often related to the one above, and means that the web
server closed the connection before the user agent could receive the whole
response.
What does "Worker 31842 has no heartbeat, restarting"
mean?¶
As long as they are accepting new connections, Hypnotoad worker processes send
heartbeat messages to the manager process at regular intervals, to signal that
they are still responsive. A blocking operation such as an infinite loop in
your application (or active connections after a worker has stopped accepting
new connections) can prevent this, and will force the affected worker to be
restarted after a timeout. This "heartbeat_timeout" defaults to 20
seconds and can be extended if your application requires it.
MORE¶
You can continue with Mojolicious::Guides now or take a look at the Mojolicious
wiki <
http://github.com/kraih/mojo/wiki>, which contains a lot more
documentation and examples by many different authors.
SUPPORT¶
If you have any questions the documentation might not yet answer, don't hesitate
to ask on the mailing-list <
http://groups.google.com/group/mojolicious>
or the official IRC channel "#mojo" on
"irc.perl.org".