lean prototyping stack

For my new startup I play with a lean prototyping stack that will enable me to prototype and evaluate ideas really fast and test on the market. The idea is to bump out a new idea, prove it and if it works scale it further. In order to not having to rewrite the entire app once it is clear that the idea is worth pushing I tried to come up with a nice stack that enables me to prototype fast and scale if I have to.

Running against all trends I use perl (neither hip nor trendy) and the quite new Mojolicious framework to do the frontend part. In Mojolicious::Lite I can prototype a small application in no time and can host it really simple, worst case as a CGI. Mojolicious has a very powerful HTTP client integrated that makes programming against JSON based HTTP APIs really straight forward.

$client->get($url)->success->json->{rows}->[0]->{doc}

This is a request to the second part of my stack: CouchDB. CouchDB is a much loved citizen in my tool chain and there are no big surprises that I picked it as my storage layer. The simplicity and elegance of CouchDB in this environment makes it even more compelling.

When writing a small web app I normally hit the moment where I either want to do something asynchronous or where tasks are taking too long to wait for. Sending mails is one of those tasks. You are normally not interested in the outcome, if things go wrong you either tell the user via AJAX or not at all but you don't want to wait for it. I am used to have some sort of backend that takes care of all that. Problem with a small prototyping framework is that you don't want to write a full blown backend. RabbitMQ to the rescue. RabbitMQ has a JSON RPC interface that mimics AMQP via a HTTP/JSON interface. This fits perfectly into the rest of my little framework as it is the same set of protocols again and if I need to scale I can write native AMQP daemons.

Scaling out to may small prototypes is as easy as creating the new CouchDB databases. Most probably there is a backend daemon for what we need already written from an earlier project or we write a quick and dirty script in any language we like and process the asynchronous messages. Frontwise the interface is simple enough and pure HTTP/JSON requests all over. Starting the Mojolicious app is in the smallest form one file that I can use as a CGI right away.

I'll push some libraries that I need on the way to github as usual. If it turns out to work as nice and reusable as it looks in the moment I am happy to share more if there is interest.