General Introduction

The Reactor

The reactor must be in control of the main ruby thread. Generally you wrap your entire program inside of the run block:

    EventMachine::run do
     EventMachine::start_server ...
    end

The end of the blocks execution will spin up the reactor, this will not return until something in the runtime loop calls EventMachine::stop. . The rest of the code in below assumes being run inside a run block.

Connections

Can be defined a few ways:

Blocks/Procs:

    EventMachine::connect '127.0.0.1', 22 do |c|
     def c.receive_data(data)
      p data
     end
    end

Modules:

    module Echo
     def receive_data(data)
      p data
     end
    end
    EventMachine::connect '127.0.0.1', 22, Echo

Classes:

    class Echo < EventMachine::Connection
     def initialize(*args)
      super
      # stuff here...
     end
     
     def receive_data(data)
      p data
     end
    end
    EventMachine::connect '127.0.0.1', 22, Echo

A lot of people settle for modules, this leaves flexibility in the future.

Timers

Again, Blocks/Procs, Instances, Subclasses

Block:

    time = Time.now
    EventMachine::add_timer(1) do
     puts "hello one second from #{time}!"
    end

Instances:

    EventMachine::Timer.new(1, proc { puts 'hi' })

• Instances can use blocks too of course...
• Scheduled as soon as the reactor is unblocked, and in strict order of definition.
• There's add_periodic_timer too..