Peterbe.com

A couple of weeks ago we had accidentally broken our production server (for a particular report) because of broken HTML. It was an unclosed tag which rendered everything after that tag to just plain white. Our comprehensive test suite failed to notice it because it didn't look at details like that. And when it was tested manually we simply missed the conditional situation when it was caused. Neither good excuses. So it got me thinking how can we incorporate HTML (html5 in particular) validation into our test suite.

So I wrote a little gist and used it a bit on a couple of projects and was quite pleased with the results. But I thought this might be something worthwhile to keep around for future projects or for other people who can't just copy-n-paste a gist.

With that in mind I put together a little package with a README and a setup.py and now you can use it too.

There are however some caveats. Especially if you intend to run it as part of your test suite.

Caveat number 1

You can't flood htmlvalidator.nu. Well, you can I guess. It would be really evil of you and kittens will die. If you have a test suite that does things like response = self.client.get(reverse('myapp:myview')) and there are many tests you might be causing an obscene amount of HTTP traffic to them. Which brings us on to...

Caveat number 2

The htmlvalidator.nu site is written in Java and it's open source. You can basically download their validator and point django-html-validator to it locally. Basically the way it works is java -jar vnu.jar myfile.html. However, it's slow. Like really slow. It takes about 2 seconds to run just one modest HTML file. So, you need to be patient.

Premailer is probably my most successful open source project in recent years. I base that on the fact that 25 different people have committed to it.

Today I merged a monster PR by Michael Jason Smith of OnlineGroups.net.

What it does is basically that it makes premailer work in Python 3, PyPy and Python 2.6. Check out the tox.ini file. Test coverage is still 100%.

If you look at the patch the core of the change is actually surprisingly little. The majority of the "secret sauce" is basically a bunch of import statements which are split by if sys.version_info >= (3, ): and some various minor changes around encoding UTF-8. The rest of the changes are basically test sit-ups.

A really interesting thing that hit us was that the code had assumptions about the order of things. Basically the tests assumed the the order of certain things in the resulting output was predictable even though it was done using a dict. dicts are famously unreliable in terms of the order you get things out and it's meant to be like that and it's a design choice. The reason it worked till now is not only luck but quite amazing.

Anyway, check it out. Now that we have a tox.ini file it should become much easier to run tests which I hope means patches will be better checked as they come in.

Because this took me quite a while to figure out, I thought I'd share in case somebody else is falling into the same pit of confusion.

When you write an attribute directive in angularjs you might want to have it fed by an attribute value.
For example, something like this:

<div my-attribute="somevalue"></div>

How then do you create a new scope that takes that in? It's not obvious. Any here's how you do it:

app.directive('myAttribute', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        scope: {
            myAttribute: '='
        },
        template: '<div style="font-weight:bold">{{ myAttribute | number:2 }}</div>'
    };
});

The trick to notice is that the "self attribute" because the name of the attribute in camel case.

Thanks @mythmon for helping me figure this out.

One of my most popular GitHub Open Source projects is premailer. It's a python library for combining HTML and CSS into HTML with all its CSS inlined into tags. This is a useful and necessary technique when sending HTML emails because you can't send those with an external CSS file (or even a CSS style tag in many cases).

The project has had 23 contributors so far and as always people come in get some itch they have scratched and then leave. I really try to get good test coverage and when people come with code I almost always require that it should come with tests too.

But sometimes you miss things. Also, this project was born as a weekend hack that slowly morphed into an actual package and its own repository and I bet there was code from that day that was never fully test covered.

So today I combed through the code and plugged all the holes where there wasn't test coverage.
Also, I set up Coveralls (project page) which is an awesome service that hooks itself up with Travis CI so that on every build and every Pull Request, the tests are run with --with-cover on nosetests and that output is reported to Coveralls.

The relevant changes you need to do are:

1) You need to go to coveralls.io (sign in with your GitHub account) and add the repo.
2) Edit your .travis.yml file to contain the following:

before_install:
    - pip install coverage
...
after_success:
    - pip install coveralls
    - coveralls

And you need to execute your tests so that coverage is calculated (the coverage module stores everything in a .coverage file which coveralls analyzes and sends). So in my case I change to this:

script:
    - nosetests premailer --with-cover --cover-erase --cover-package=premailer

3) You must also give coveralls some clues. So it reports on only the relevant files. Here's what mine looked like:

[run]
source = premailer

[report]
omit = premailer/test*

Now, I get to have a cute "coverage: 100%" badge in the README and when people post pull requests Coveralls will post a comment to reflect how the pull request changes the test coverage.

I am so grateful for all these wonderful tools. And it's all free too!

I just rolled out a change here on my personal blog which I hope will make my few visitors happy.

**Basically; when you hover over a link (local link) long enough it prefetches it (with AJAX) so that if you do click it's hopefully already cached in your browser. **

If you hover over a link and almost instantly hover out it cancels the prefetching. The assumption here is that if you deliberately put your mouse cursor over a link and proceed to click on it you want to go there. Because your hand is relatively slow I'm using the opportunity to prefetch it even before you have clicked. Some hands are quicker than others so it's not going to help for the really quick clickers.

What I also had to do was set a Cache-Control header of 1 hour on every page so that the browser can learn to cache it.

The effect is that when you do finally click the link, by the time your browser loads it and changes the rendered output it'll hopefully be able to do render it from its cache and thus it becomes visually ready faster.

Let's try to demonstrate this with this horrible animated gif:
(or download the screencast.mov file)

1. Hover over a link (in this case the "Now I have a Gmail account" from 2004)
2. Notice how the Network panel preloads it
3. Click it after a slight human delay
4. Notice that when the clicked page is loaded, its served from the browser cache
5. Profit!

So the code that does is is quite simply:

$(function() {
  var prefetched = [];
  var prefetch_timer = null;
  $('div.navbar, div.content').on('mouseover', 'a', function(e) {
    var value = e.target.attributes.href.value;
    if (value.indexOf('/') === 0) {
      if (prefetched.indexOf(value) === -1) {
        if (prefetch_timer) {
          clearTimeout(prefetch_timer);
        }
        prefetch_timer = setTimeout(function() {
          $.get(value, function() {
            // necessary for $.ajax to start the request :(
          });
          prefetched.push(value);
        }, 200);
      }
    }
  }).on('mouseout', 'a', function(e) {
    if (prefetch_timer) {
      clearTimeout(prefetch_timer);
    }
  });
});

Also, available on GitHub.

I'm excited about this change because of a couple of reasons:

1. On mobile, where you might be on a non-wifi data connection you don't want this. There you don't have the mouse event onmouseover triggering. So people on such devices don't "suffer" from this optimization.
2. It only downloads the HTML which is quite light compared to static assets such as pictures but it warms up the server-side cache if needs be.
3. It's much more targetted than a general prefetch meta header.
4. Most likely content will appear rendered to your eyes faster.

So I have a massive chunk of JSON that a Django view is sending to a piece of Angular that displays it nicely on the page. It's big. 674Kb actually. And it's likely going to be bigger in the near future. It's basically a list of dicts. It looks something like this:

>>> pprint(d['events'][0])
{u'archive_time': None,
 u'archive_url': u'/manage/events/archive/1113/',
 u'channels': [u'Main'],
 u'duplicate_url': u'/manage/events/duplicate/1113/',
 u'id': 1113,
 u'is_upcoming': True,
 u'location': u'Cyberspace - Pacific Time',
 u'modified': u'2014-08-06T22:04:11.727733+00:00',
 u'privacy': u'public',
 u'privacy_display': u'Public',
 u'slug': u'bugzilla-development-meeting-20141115',
 u'start_time': u'15 Nov 2014 02:00PM',
 u'start_time_iso': u'2014-11-15T14:00:00-08:00',
 u'status': u'scheduled',
 u'status_display': u'Scheduled',
 u'thumbnail': {u'height': 32,
                u'url': u'/media/cache/e7/1a/e71a58099a0b4cf1621ef3a9fe5ba121.png',
                u'width': 32},
 u'title': u'Bugzilla Development Meeting'}

So I thought one hackish simplification would be to convert each of these dicts into an list with a known sort order. Something like this:

>>> event = d['events'][0]
>>> pprint([event[k] for k in sorted(event)])
[None,
 u'/manage/events/archive/1113/',
 [u'Main'],
 u'/manage/events/duplicate/1113/',
 1113,
 True,
 u'Cyberspace - Pacific Time',
 u'2014-08-06T22:04:11.727733+00:00',
 u'public',
 u'Public',
 u'bugzilla-development-meeting-20141115',
 u'15 Nov 2014 02:00PM',
 u'2014-11-15T14:00:00-08:00',
 u'scheduled',
 u'Scheduled',
 {u'height': 32,
  u'url': u'/media/cache/e7/1a/e71a58099a0b4cf1621ef3a9fe5ba121.png',
  u'width': 32},
 u'Bugzilla Development Meeting']
 

So I converted my sample events.json file like that:

$ l -h events*
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel   674K Aug  8 14:08 events.json
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel   423K Aug  8 15:06 events.optimized.json

Excitingly the file is now 250Kb smaller because it no longer contains all those keys.

Now, I'd also send the order of the keys so I could do something like this in the AngularJS code:

 .success(function(response) {
   events = []
   response.events.forEach(function(event) {
     var new_event = {}
     response.keys.forEach(function(key, i) {
       new_event[k] = event[i]
     })
   })
 })
 

Yuck! Nested loops! It was just getting more and more complicated.
Also, if there are keys that are not present in every element, it means I'd have to replace them with None.

At this point I stopped and I could smell the hackish stink of sulfur of the hole I was digging myself into.
Then it occurred to me, gzip is really good at compressing repeated things which is something we have plenty of in a document store type data structure that a list of dicts is.

So I packed them manually to see what we could get:

$ apack events.json.gz events.json
$ apack events.optimized.json.gz events.optimized.json

And without further ado...

$ l -h events*
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel   674K Aug  8 14:08 events.json
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel    90K Aug  8 14:20 events.json.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel   423K Aug  8 15:06 events.optimized.json
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  wheel    81K Aug  8 15:07 events.optimized.json.gz

Basically, all that complicated and slow hoopla for saving 10Kb. No thank you.

Thank you gzip for existing!

Yesterday I had the good fortune to present Crontabber to the The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group organized by my friend Josh Berkus.

To spare you having to watch the whole presentation I'm going to summarize some of it here.

My colleague Lars also has a blog post about Crontabber and goes into a bit more details about the nitty gritty of using PostgreSQL.

What is crontabber?

It's a tool for running cron jobs. It's written in Python and PostgreSQL and it's a tool we need for Socorro which has lots and lots of stored procedures and cron jobs.

So it's basically a script that gets started by UNIX crontab and runs every 5 minutes. Internally it keeps an index of all the apps it needs to run and it manages dependencies between jobs and is self-healing meaning that if something goes wrong during run-time it just retries again and again until it works. Amongst many of the juicy features it offers on top of regular "cron wrappers" is something we call "backfilling".

Backfill jobs are jobs that happen on a periodic basis and get given a date. If all is working this date is the same as "now()" but if something was to go wrong it remembers all the dates that did not work and re-attempts with those exact dates. That means that you can guarantee that the job gets started with every date possible even if it needs to catch up on past dates.

There's plenty of documentation on how to install and create jobs but it all starts with a simple pip install crontabber.

To get a feel for how you write crontabber "apps", checkout the ones for Socorro or flick through the slides in the PDF.

Is it mature?

Yes! It all started in early 2012 as a part of the Socorro code base and after some hard months of it stabalizing and maturing we decided to extract it out of Socorro and into its own project on GitHub under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0 licence. Now it stands on its own legs and has no longer anything to do with Socorro and can be used for anything and anyone who has a lot of complicated cron jobs that need to run in Python with a PostgreSQL connection. In Socorro we use it primarily for executing stored procedures but that's just one type of app. You can also make it call out on to anything the command line with a "@with_subprocess" decorator.

Is it finished?

No. It works really well for us but there's a decent list of features we want to add. The hope is that by open sourcing it we can get other organizations to adopt it and not only find bugs but also contribute code to add more juicy features.

One of the soon-to-come features we have in mind is to "internalize locking". At the moment you have to wrap it in a bash script that prevents it from being run concurrently. Crontabber is single-threaded and we don't have to worry about "dependent jobs" starting before "parent jobs" because the depdendencies and their state is stored in the database. But you might need to worry about the same job (the one due next) to be started concurrently. By internalizing the locking we can store, in the state database, that a particular job is being started on and thus not have to worry about it starting the same job twice.

I really hope this project can grow and continue to support us in our needs.

MozTrap is what's called a "test case management system". Basically, software QA people need a structure and pattern to their testing. What to test, what versions to test on and what hardware/operatting system etc all is part of a "test suite". That's what MozTrap manages.

So this project was built by Mozilla's automation and tools team. It is currently not an actively developed project. Not because it's not needed or used but because it basically maps all the features we need. A large part of the code base was originally written by a personal friend of mine who I respect wholeheartedly; Carl Meyer of Django/pip/virtualenv/etc fame. I'm grateful for the awesome documentation he left behind amongst many other things.

Together with the team we sat down and listed all the biggest pain points as of today. Basically, the number one thing is speed. Pages load too slowly. Normally when web developers worry themselves with web performance it's a matter of shaving milliseconds off a page where a clients perception equals lost or gained profits. Here's not a problem of milliseconds but a problem of seconds. After some quick poking around on the production site and looking at some code the conclusion is simple: The site is so darn slow because the HTML sent from the server is way too MASSIVE. And baked into that is a mixture of the poor web server having to produce a massive HTML blob and it being sent over the wire.

One test run I made said it took 14 seconds to render a certain page.

Why is it so slow?

So how did this happen and why is it not Carl's fault? :) The reason it happened was because of the underestimated number of options added to the advanced filtering drop-downs. On a local dev version you never notice these things because you set up some options, for example tags, and the drop-down never gets larger than 10-20 options. For example, the "Creator" drop-down today has 1,664 different choices.

If you take all those choices and turn thing into a HTML like this: <option value="1">Adam</option>\n<option value="2">Bram</option>... etc. you get 66Kb of just HTML. However, MozTrap doesn't work like that. Instead it uses pretty drop-downs that don't look like regular HTML drop-downs. See for yourself; go to https://moztrap.mozilla.org/results/runs/ and click the "Advanced Filtering" button.
So, that means that the HTML for each option instead looks like this:

<li class="filter-item">
  <input name="filter-creator" data-name="creator" value="1" id="id-filter-creator-1" class="check" type="checkbox">
  <span class="onoff">
    <label for="id-filter-creator-1" class="onoffswitch">Adam</label>
                <span class="pinswitch"></span>
    <span class="content" title="creator: Adam">Adam</span>
  </span>
</li>

Now you get 620Kb of just HTML just for the "Creators" field. Granted, that is the biggest field of all the drop-downs but lots of them are massive.

So, this makes the page weigh a total of about 1.1Mb just for the HTML. Not only is it a lot of work for the (Django) server to generate this but it's also a heck of a lot of data to send across the Internet on every page request.

So what was the solution?

An ideal solution would have been a significant re-write whereby much of the values of the page gets rewritten as later AJAX calls. I.e. load a skeleton that loads superfast, and then load some AJAX in the background. That AJAX could potentially be cached in the browser with localStorage or something so that you get something to show very quickly whilst you wait for the AJAX request to complete. But this would have been too big a change and the way the filtering works on these pages, you actually need all the options in the drop-downs on immediate load because of the way "pinned filters" work.

So the solution was to replace all the repeated HTML chunks with 1 JSON string and then a piece of Javascript template rendering. So, in the Django template code instead of:

{% for field in filters %}
  {% include "lists/_filter_group.html" with advanced=1 prefix="filter" pinable=1 %}
{% endfor %}

We now replace this with:

<script>
var FILTERS = {% filterset_to_json filters with advanced=1 prefix="filter" pinable=1 %}
</script>
<script id="filter_group" type="text/html">
<section class="filter-group {{ field.cls }}" data-name="{{ field.key }}">
  <h5 class="category-title">
    {{ _field_name_lower }}
    {{# field.switchable }}
    ...

What that basically is is some Mustache code that I use to generate the HTML DOM nodes and insert into the page after load.

In conclusion

So basically nothing changes. Nothing of the Django view had to change. Visually there's no difference and the same actual user data is sent from the server to the client but just packed in a more optimal way.

There are multiple pages where these massive "Advanced Filtering" options exist but on one page I measured the whole page went from weighing 1.1Mb down to 132Kb.

On Friday I did a Show HN and got featured on the front page for HTML Tree.

Amazingly, out of the 3,858 visitors (according to Google Analytics today) 2,034 URLs were submitted and tested on the app. Clearly a lot of people just clicked the example submission but out of those 1,634 were unique. Granted, some people submitted more than one URL but I think a large majority of people came up with a URL of their own to try. Isn't that amazing! What a turnout of a Friday afternoon hack (with some Sunday night hacking to make it into a decent looking website).

The lesson to learn here is that the Hacker News crowd is excellent for getting engagement. Yes, there are a lot of blather and almost repetitive submissions but by and large it's a very engaging community. Suck on that those who make fun of HN!

UPDATE

HTMLTree has been moved to https://htmltree.herokuapp.com/