Saturday, May 17, 2014

Topic from scalaz-stream

I've been playing around with scalaz-stream topics, and didn't understand how they worked. My first attempt was this:



(And note that this was supposed to be just a quick example; you certainly would end up with different threads publishing and subscribing to a topic.)

That had a few problems:

• Line 7-8: the type of out1 is Process[Task, String \/ Int]. Those are useful, but they're only part of the way towards what I needed. What I really wanted was to go from a process to a task to running the task.

• Line 11-13: again, I'm only part of the way there. Both of these produce Task[Unit], and they needed to be run.

So I asked for help on the scalaz mailing list, and Pavel Chlupáček pointed me in the right direction.
The working version is:



• Lines 6-8 produce a Task[IndexedSeq[String \/ Int]], one step further than in the first version (where the steps are process >> task >> run the task).

• Lines 10-12 actually run the task - and anything published before the attemptRun won't be seen by the subscriber.

• Line 19 stalls, waiting for the attemptRun to hook up the subscriber. (As the note says, I think this is only something you'd do for a demo).

• Lines 21-22 actually run the tasks they create