Edit-Plackup-Test-Rinse-Repeat

At INOC, my place of work, I work on a lot of web applications with the backend written in Perl using Catalyst, and the frontend written in Javascript using ExtJS. With a UI written completely in Javascript, I often encounter bugs of the following form:

1. Fire up Catalyst.
2. Login.
3. Click through half a dozen controls in the UI.
4. Enter some data.
5. Click “submit”.
6. Watch the web application give you an angry error.

As you can imagine, the time for a single iteration of this cycle is fairly long, and the process is quite tedious. Obviously, if the error lies within the Javascript side, there's not much I can do about it, short of writing a Greasemonkey script to do some of the automation for me. However, half of the time, the server is returning some strange output given a certain set of inputs for a particular RPC call. Wouldn't it be nice if you could go through the application and have it record the requests you make to be submitted over and over again at a later time?

That's why I wrote Plack-Middleware-Recorder.

Plack-Middleware-Recorder is a distribution that comes with several modules:

• Plack::Middleware::Recorder - A PSGI middleware that knows how to serialize requests to a stream.
• Plack::Middleware::Debug::Recorder - A debugging panel that allows you to manipulate the recorder middleware from a browser.
• Plack::VCR - A utility module that allows you to read a recorded request stream.

These modules allow you to build PSGI applications and scripts that record and replay requests to a web application. However, Plack-Middleware-Recorder also contains two scripts, plack-record and plack-replay, that do exactly what they sound like. So my workflow for handling a server-side bug goes from this:

1. Steps 1 - 6 above
2. Add some debugging log output
3. Repeat, and observe the new output

to this:

1. plack-record > requests.out
2. Steps 1 - 6
3. Add some debugging log output
4. plack-replay requests.out app.psgi
5. GOTO 3

Plack-Middleware-Recorder is still very young; I plan on adding better session support, dumping request streams to test files, and other features in the future. In the week since I've written it, I've already gotten a lot of mileage out of it; I hope other people find it just as useful!

-Rob